Oprah Movie Club Pick for July: The Godfather

1972 movie

Rating: 20/20 (Jen: 18/20)

Plot: A powerful mafia family makes the transition from one Don to another Don, interesting since nobody in the family actually seems to be named Don. After Vito refuses to help out a rival family involved in the drug trade, violence and eventually a war break out. Youngest son Michael who had distanced himself from his family's criminal activities is drawn into the family business. 

I apologize for this being several months late, but that sort of thing happens when you're going through a mid-life crisis. Actually, I was just waiting for somebody to make me an offer that I could not refuse or at least spice up my mornings by putting a horse's head in my bed. At the end of August, I did wake up, look under my covers, and start screaming, but it was for different reasons. 

I would like to see a retelling of this story from the perspective of that decapitated horse, by the way. This makes two animal decapitations in a row for me, at least according to the order I'm writing about things on the blog. But hear me out on this retelling/remake. The film starts with the horse, probably played by Adrian Brody, talking to Babe the pig from the movie Babe. The horse is talking about how he may have to leave the farm because some old rich guy wants to buy him and use him to breed racehorses. Babe, a little naive, says, "You mean, some rich guy is going to mount you?" and the horse says, "No, I'd be having relations with other horses--girl ones." Babe would say, "Lucky you! That sounds pretty hot!" and the horse will answer, "No, Babe. You're forgetting that I'm a gay horse." Then, they have an off-screen sexual encounter. That's plot twist #1. Later, Brody is at his new home. He's daydreaming, and the audience gets to enjoy a montage of the horse and Babe having gay old times--including some on-screen sexual encounters--while an original song that I wrote called "Horsey Porking [Love in B-Minor]" plays. The daydreaming is interrupted when Woltz, played by either a CGI-John Marley or an animatronic one, comes in and says, "Get ready for action, horse!" He brings in a girl horse played by Sarah Jessica Parker. She whinnies, and Adrian Brody Horse has to pretend that he's sick to avoid an unwanted sexual encounter. Tom Hagen shows up, and the horse gets an idea. He chops off his own head and throws it in Woltz's bed--with the help a scarecrow, some dancing and singing mice (because I want this to be something that children can also enjoy), and Johnny Fontane. That's right--he chopped off his own head! That's plot twist #2 and possibly the reason why I'm on my way to an original screenplay Oscar. The head is discarded, but in yet another plot twist, the horse is still alive and, with the help of his pig lover Babe, flees to Sicily where he befriends--you guessed it--Michael Corleone and gives him advice on stuff. This is after his head is fused to the body of (Plot twist #4!) a unicorn. I'm not sure if there's a horse seen during the wedding scene in Sicily in this The Godfather movie, but Coppola's pal George Lucas can help him digitally insert one in there. 

Anyway, I need to work on an ending. 

I'm amazed at how simply such a complicated story is told. There are gaps in the storytelling, but what's missing isn't exactly vital anyway, and the whole thing is structured like a Shakespearean tragedy. The dynamics between the characters are never spelled out but become clear as the characters grow right on the screen. The acting must be good in this thing because those characters become so real, their intentions so clear, and their inner conflicts so rich without the help of anything we're told in the movie. Pacino and Caan are both great playing two very different sons. Pacino does inner conflict so well that you can almost see the inner monologue bleeding through his eyes. And Caan plays unhinged in such a way that you almost worry about the real James Caan. Everybody's just so good in this movie. Duvall's as good as I've seen him as Hagen, Abe Vigoda begging for his character's life with Duvall might be the former's finest acting moment. Loved the aforementioned non-animatronic Marley as Woltz, and his horse was pretty good, too. And no, I'm not ignoring the very best acting performance in this movie--Sofia Coppola as the baby. God, I hope Sofia Coppola's in the sequels!

What about female characters? My wife was a little bored with this. It was the first time she had seen it. I speculated that it's a "boy movie" because the women are mostly in the background, but my father assured me that it was not a "boy movie" at all. There is a little romance with Michael and the gal with the nipples in Sicily but it's only developed to the point where its conclusion will matter. Diane Keaton is really good as his love interest in America, and Rocky's wife is fine whenever she's on the screen, but I wouldn't call them important characters. No, this movie's more of a proverbial sausage fest. The most notable lack of screen time would be Vito's wife. How many lines does she get in this movie? Anyway, do females like this movie? 

This movie opens with a considerable amount of black screen before the slow pull back shot with Bonasera talking about how much he believes in America. Is that where the makers of The Sopranos got the idea to end their series with a black screen? Probably! I like this semi-soliloquy to start the film, by the way. It forces you to consider the American dream in the context of the whole story. I don't have the energy to flesh out those details exactly, but there's got to be something there. And then you meet Vito for the first time, Brando acting with nothing more than a right hand. And then you see Brando for the first time and he's manhandling a kitty. 

My question: What happens to that cat? It's not in the movie anymore after this first scene. Why give the Godfather a cat for only one scene in the entire movie? Does the cat do something wrong and is dispatched? Brando's character is a criminal, but he's also clearly a loving family man. Is the cat an easy visual way to show the two sides of this complex character? 

I love how much you learn about Vito in the early wedding scenes. You see him dealing with people, and the respect they have for him is obvious. Love watching Luca Brasi practicing his interaction with Vito in a simple scene that shows you so much. Lenny Montana is really good, probably the best performance by a former wrestler if you take Tor Johnson's work in Plan 9 from Outer Space or The Beast of Yucca Flats out of the picture. 

What can you say about this nearly-perfect movie? There are so many memorable scenes--Sonny getting it at the toll booth and Brando's reaction to seeing his son's bullet-riddled body, the horse head in the bed, the brilliant montage with the juxtaposition of the hits being carried out and Michael renouncing Satan at the baptism where he literally becomes the Godfather, Michael's retaliation in the restaurant where Pacino does so much with his eyes, Brando's ability to gyrate his forehead, that final shot of Michael in the doorway after his life leaves. I think the simple matter-of-fact style of the movie enhances the moments. Really, it's such a simple style. The cinematography is very dark at times which seems intentional at times, but there's almost no flash to the direction and nothing that stands out as a stylistic touch. This film seems old school because it's the storytelling and characters created by great acting that make it all work so perfectly.

My favorite piece of trivia from this: Mario Puzo had an issue with a part in the script that called for a character to "brown some sausage" and crossed out "brown" to replace it with "fries," adding "Gangsters don't brown" in the margins. That's just great.

My favorite character: Enzo.

A question: Was there ever a board game based on The Godfather? Kind of like a Candyland thing but with more Italians and violence and less color and candy? If not, why? I mean, if they made a Welcome Back, Kotter board game, why not a Godfather one?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for May: North by Northwest

1959 thriller

Rating: 18/20

Plot: An advertising executive is mistaken for a CIA agent who doesn't even exist and has to traverse the country to find him and exculpate himself of a crime he didn't commit. He meets a blonde and nearly ruins his suit.

First, here's the location for the crop-dusting scene on Google Maps. I thought this was cool.

Hitchcock had a gift for creating thrills, but the thing that sticks out more for me in North by Northwest is the randiness and comedic touches. He and writer Ernest Lehman sauce things up with the arrival of the fetching Eva Marie Saint. The dialogue titillates, double entendres sparkle. Grant's suave and charming, the kind of dude who demonstrates a Hemingwayian "grace under pressure" when taking the time to flirt with a random broad while being chased by good guys and bad guys and chasing non-existent guys, but when you take a step back and look at him, he's not all that bright. Eve Kendell's a little too convenient, isn't she? The character might be great at playing the role, so seductive that his part nearly shifts, but why wouldn't a question like "Wait a second--why is she helping me?" ever cross his mind? I guess because his mind's in his trousers. I'm trying to place myself in Thornhill's loafers to decide whether I'd take the risk for a chance to have Eva Marie Saint fondle the back of my head, and I think I've ultimately decided that I would. She is, after all, a "big girl" "in all the right places," and there's just something about the little movements of her eyebrows, the way her fingers dance across Grant's ears, and the way she blows out a match that would be hard to resist. I know there are folks who would have liked to see another actress in this role, but Eva Marie Saint nails it for me, and I'd find it hard to believe that Cary Grant was without a boner in more than a few of these scenes. Love the way she says "I'm twenty-six and unmarried. Now you know everything." Their whole back-and-forth on the train is as stimulating as any modern sex scene, and they don't even "do it" (as the kids would say) on that first train ride. I know that because Hitchcock shows us an exterior shot of the train rumbling powerfully down the tracks while saving the phallic-symbol-entering-a-tunnel shot for the very end of the film. Randy!

Man, "using sex like some people use a flyswatter" is such a good line. He's got a few good lines. I like the one where he asks about which "subtle form of manslaughter" is going to be attempted next after they bad guys have tried to kill him by staging a drunk driving accident and hitting him with a plane. Not the most practical ways to end somebody's life. He also, exhibiting more of that grace under pressure, cracks jokes about real bullets and takes jabs at Eva. And he does it all like a true movie star, just exuding the kind of coolness that could make some men question their sexuality. They don't make movie stars like that anymore unless you'd put Clooney in that category. I also liked Landau's henchman character. There was just enough subtle suggestion to make you wonder about Leonard's sexuality and throw a submerged love triangle subplot in there. The camera just caught Landau's Leonard staring longingly at his boss too often. Speaking of Vandamm, I like how our first glimpse of him shows him playing croquet. And we learn later that he's not even playing croquet at his own house and maybe, unless he brought his own set along, playing with his own equipment. For whatever reason, that's funny. [Edit: My father tells me that it's Landau playing croquet. Are they both playing? It's not a game you're supposed to play by yourself.] The bad guys aren't exactly well-written characters, and there's little depth. They're just kind of there to throw Thornhill into different situations.

I hadn't seen this movie in a long time and remembered some of the effects being dated. I thought there was more green screen use, I guess. I'm not sure what I was thinking because the two big moments--the plane and Mt. Rushmore--look really good. Well, Mt. Rushmore looks as if it's a little too small, but I don't know for sure because I've never been there. But I did really believe the characters were climbing down the faces on that monument. That entire sequence seems like it would be too goofy to work, but I like what Hitchcock does with camera angles, and the suspense overshadows the absurdity of the whole thing. The crop-dusting scene takes place in Indiana, something that I was not aware of. That's appropriate because that kind of thing happens in Western Indiana all the time. That's a great scene, especially if you have seen the movie or looked at the poster and spotted the plane. Hitchcock uses time very well there and gets away with having Cary Grant just stand there looking at dirt for a lot longer that most people would think about having him stand there looking at dirt. The entire thing is shown sans music, and if you listen closely enough, you can hear the rumbling plane the whole time. Later, there's the great shot of Grant and the guy with the hat standing on opposite sides of the road just looking at each other and a great use of rustling corn. Great scene! The only effect that does look a little quaint is the drunken drive chase sequence. Grant's facial expressions don't help that scene much.

The whole movie isn't sans music, of course, and Bernard Herrmann's  score is terrific. I love the boisterous opening music, stuff you're just not going to hear in movies anymore. They don't make movie stars and they don't do movie music like that anymore. There are times when Herrmann's score is a little too big maybe, but it punctuates perfectly most of the time, easily enhancing more than it gets in the way. His compositions always make driving seem more exciting than it does in other movies.

This also has one of my favorite Hitchcock cameos. He gets it out of the way early here. A tiny razor, uproarious elevator laughter, another mom character, a pair of stolen cabs, unintelligible dialogue at an airport, and, according to my father, a kid in a restaurant covering his ears. There's just a ton to love about this mistaken identity everyman adventure yarn!

Oprah Movie Club Pick for April: Wake in Fright

1971 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A disgruntled teacher on Christmas break plans to travel to Sydney but gets stuck in Hell along the way. He drinks, makes some friends, kills a few kangaroos, drinks some more, and gets a little too friendly with a bald bearded man.

This movie is apparently also called Outback. I don't like that title or Wake in Fright actually, but I'm not sure what I'd call it.

This might have to be my go-to Christmas movie from now on. There's a great performance of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by a dumpy, dispassionate middle-aged man. I'm sure there's a full version of the performance in the bonus features of the disc, but I didn't check because I didn't want to get too much in the Christmas spirit in May. I mean, April! The end of April!

The opening shots of this--a circular tour of the browns and different shades of brown in Tiboonda--set the stage. Australia is apparently a dilapidated place. All I know about Australia was learned watching Finding Nemo several times. Oh, and Crocodile Dundee. This paints Australia as a fairly bleak place, a good thing for me since all my favorite movie places are fairly bleak. Doc's dilapidated shack--dilapidated because he's probably shot it full of holes--the school house; both "hotels" he stays in, either one which could have contained its own urine couch; the front porch of the pub the quartet of hunters nearly destroys; the unlikely spaciousness of the gambling room; the dry, sizzling Outback. These are settings you can feel, atmospheres that make you feel like sweating right along with the characters. Add the sound--creaking, bored guitars, buzzing. Flies buzz around this movie like it's a carcass, probably of a kangaroo. Hell's a kangaroo carcass. Pleasance's character's first words are so appropriate: "All the little devils are proud of hell."

Was that a metronome I heard in that opening scene in the classroom? If so, we've got a streak of two in a row for Oprah Movie Club picks that have a metronome. As a public educator, I can tell you that that was an accurate portrayal of what happens in the typical classroom. It's a staring contest between students and a teacher, one that ends with the teacher getting a gift. Add a few standardized tests, and you've got an accurate look at public education. I did appreciate that all of the poor guy's problems seemed to evolve from his desire to not teach anymore. I know teaching can drive somebody to drink and gamble, but I've never met anybody who wanted to stab a kangaroo to death because of teaching.

Speaking of kangaroos, I might as well get that out of the way. That kangaroo hunt seemed really dangerous to everybody involved. It was a scene that was a little tough to watch, and I'm the type of person who really only likes kangaroos when they're boxing. It was also one of those "I can't believe this scene is in a movie" scenes, one that is so ruthless, so uncompromising. Those eerie trees illuminated by those spotlights, those red eyes of those doomed kangaroos, that close-up of the closing of that kangaroo's hand, that final shot of parts of four dead kangaroos. Those are the type of scenes you don't shake from your head for a while, artistically ugly and manic.

I like how much of this movie shows us things from the teacher's perspective. The slow pan over the faces of those bored students, the quick glance at the black dude on the train, the children running toward the train, the snippets during a scene where he's drunk, the stuff in that gambling room. The latter was electric, by the way. The circling camera around John, the shots of different funny-looking guys laughing (I love movie scenes that feature unnerving group laughter), the falling coins in slow motion followed by a freeze on the guy's face. This movie's got a filthy 1970's style--one that attracts flies apparently--and it helps us experience this guy's trip through hell through his eyes.

Gary Bond is good as the lead, a suitable everyman. I'm not sure he does a lot, but he works as an outsider who is swallowed up by circumstance until he's an insider. Chips Rafferty is great as Jock the cop. The woman who plays the front desk clerk (Maggie Dence) is aloof and sultry, popping in a pair of scenes to robotically give the main character directions. I also liked a guy with one top tooth. But Donald Pleasance steals the show with those wide eyes, giant nipples, and quick smile of his. He's so good in this as this character you know you can't trust but also don't know what else to do with.

So what the hell's this movie about? The protagonist's masculinity is questioned a few scenes before he mounts a woman and pukes. Later, of course, he gets to know--it seems--Donald Pleasance's character intimately. What's this trying to say about manning up in hell? Or Australia? Does one have to kill a kangaroo in order to become a man? Is it our obligation as males to lose all inhibitions, drink ourselves into stupors, lose our shirts, gamble and growl, smash up a joint, stroll around town with a rifle? Just what would Crocodile Dundee say about all this? What would the heroes of Australia--the ones remembered when everything stops in the middle of the night for an odd "Lest We Forget" tribute--say about it? What about John's girlfriend? What about the kangaroos?

This is a mysterious little movie, one that feels like a horror movie without being a horror movie. Throw it in the pile with movies like The Wicker Man or After Hours, stories that feature these unfortunate guys who are out of their element and in these situations where they seemingly have no control. John survives the experience like Paul in After Hours, ending up right where he started. His journey is a giant nightmarish circle, one that echoes that opening shot of the film that shows us Tiboonda.

Great pick, Matt from Canada! I'd actually never heard of this movie. Did anybody else watch it?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for March: Se7en

1995 horror crime movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A soon-to-be-retired detective breaks in a cocky young detective as a high-concept but psychotic serial killer punishes people for their deadly sins.

This thing's fucking depraved and so devoid of anything resembling hope that I imagine only real sicko could actually be a fan of it. Plus, it's called Se7en with that number in the title, another thing that only those with twisted or damaged souls could appreciate. My feelings are mixed. It's a downer, diving so brazenly into the depths of despair that I'm actually surprised it's so popular. At the same time, it's executed well, artful in its disturbing nature and shameless wallowing in this muddy wretchedness. This seems like the type of movie made in those early days of the Internet for people who would surf the net for celebrity autopsy photos or giggle through Faces of Death IX, but like all artistic triumphs, this is something that sticks in your head and gut for a long time after you've finished the thing and returned it to Carl's Videos. You'll remember that bloated fat man (Bob Mack in his only film role) with his eyes open and a puke bucket under the table that you can almost smell. You'll remember zombie man coughing himself alive, and you'll remember how you jumped a little even though you'd already seen this movie and knew that he was about to cough himself alive. You'll remember Freeman pondering whether he should open that box or not and then his expression when he looks at the contents. And you'll remember Spacey's eyes and wonder how an actor can make his eyes that expressionless.

Part of what makes this memorable is where Fincher places this movie. The first 3/4 of this movie is set in this anonymously decaying city, a bleak place with perpetual rain. It's all creaky fences and half-assed graffiti. When the characters are in their apartments, the outside sounds--cars, crying babies, unintelligible yawping, sirens--penetrate the walls. I watched this movie with headphones, and these outside sounds seemed to surround me and were almost overwhelming, really painting this world of complete chaos. The environments these characters find themselves in are bleak, almost in suffocating ways. There are barely windows in this movie that aren't cracked or broken, dust hangs in the air, walls are peeling and splintered. It is not a happy world at all, visually very far from the "fine  place" described by Hemingway at the quote at the end of the movie. And that rain! Are there any scenes that take place in the city where it's not raining?

The performances are great from top to bottom. Brad Pitt plays a hotshot so well that you'd almost think he was some kind of hotshot in real life. He probably touches his hair too much in this movie, and there are a few times when he probably could have used a second take, but he creates this character, as one-dimensional as the character really is, very well. The climactic "What's in the box?" scene may go down as his most powerful moment in his film career. Freeman is great playing the same character he always plays, a guy who can never ever lose his proverbial shit. I don't think I've ever seen a young and stupid and loud Morgan Freeman in a movie. Does such a movie exist? His opening line--"Look at all that passion on the wall."--almost tells you everything you need to know about his character. Not just the words--the delivery. He's tired and has stopped pretending. The early scenes in the movie have Freeman's character asking questions that people either don't want to hear or don't understand. And he sleeps to a clicking metronome. (Side note: I think movies are automatically better with metronomes. Surely I can't be the only person who finds metronomes sexy.) The clash between Pitt's idealism and Freeman's apathy works largely because of the acting. Paltrow is fine, mostly in the background. She's got a pretty head which is all that really matters in this movie. A lot of her scenes, probably because the mystery and the cat-and-mouse games in the rest of the movie are more interesting, seem like a waste of my time. I also liked R. Lee Ermey (Sarge in the Toy Stories) as the police captain or sergeant or whatever he is. His answering of a telephone with a grumpy "This isn't even my desk!" is one of the very few moments of comedy in this thing. The other would be Spacey's line about a dead dog which is a terrific bit of black comedy although knowing what you know about what's about to happen in that scene, it would almost seem appropriate if Spacey's character looked at the camera and apologized for the line. Spacey is Malkovichian in the role, and though he's only in a small chunk of the movie, he takes advantage of every word he gets to create his character. Oh, and shane-movies favorite Mark Boone Junior is in this playing "Greasy FBI Man." He's perfect at playing a character who doesn't seem to want to be in the movie he's in. And I don't know who plays the guy scraping Somerset's name off the door, but that guy shines in a 4 1/2 second role. He just nails that scene, nearly steals the whole movie as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, I can't find his name.

Quick question: (And I'm sorry for spoilers, but this is the Oprah Movie Club, and you were already supposed to have watched this.) What do you think of the whole library card thing? Is it my imagination or is that a little lame? Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare. It's not like these aren't difficult texts to acquire. The killer had books in his apartment. If he's going to go to the trouble of having his freakin' fingerprints removed, it doesn't seem like he would be so careless with a library card.

From the squelchy NIN remix over ominous credits featuring meticulous crazy person activity to the shocking conclusion, this is a movie that your stomach will never forget. It's not pleasant, but neither is the world sometimes.

This is currently the 22nd top-rated movie on imdb.com. I know there's absolutely nothing scientific about those ratings, but for a movie this pessimistic or bleak, that seems so high.

Oprah Movie Club for February: The Bucket List

2007 old fart travelogue

Rating: 14/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: A couple old guys with terminal cancer make a list of things to do before they die--skydive, race fast cars, climb a mountain, have sexual intercourse with a walrus, etc.--and bond as they globetrot to make those things happen.

This movie would have gotten at least three bonus points for a Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson/walrus sex scene.

I never really felt this movie. It's heavy subject matter, one of those stories that can be simultaneously depressing and uplifting, but it never really struck a chord. I liked the friendship of two very different human beings and thought that it unfolded very naturally in the hospital although I'd listen to arguments that that part of the movie went on for too long. Freeman and Nicholson are both good playing the same sort of characters they play nowadays, but it feels to me like they're going through the motions, and I didn't think they had any natural chemistry. And Nicholson's screaming during a skydiving scene was awkward, the type of thing that could make any walrus uncomfortable. Jack Nicholson's kind of shaped like a walrus at this stage in his life. Not in a good way. I enjoyed traveling around with these two guys and seeing pyramids and Taj Mahals and snowy mountains, but the episodic bucket-list-scratch-offing got a little tiresome after a while. Any real emotional impact sort of comes and goes, and a script that just refused to take any chances probably didn't help things. Mostly, it feels like Hollywood emotions, and when I think about the amount of money that had to be involved to make the dreams of Morgan Freeman's character come true, it kind of cheapens the whole thing.

My inability to completely connect with this makes me wonder if I'm just not quite old enough for it.

Morgan Freeman narration and shots of snow. Jennifer and I thought that we'd accidentally popped in March of the Penguins. I wouldn't have minded, by the way, seeing Freeman and Nicholson having their way with penguins either, but this just wasn't that kind of movie.

The "kiss the most beautiful girl in the world" bit almost got me. It might have if the rest of the movie would have been as good as it should have been. 

Oprah Movie Club Pick for January: The Ten Commandments

1956 Biblical epic

Rating: 15/20 (Abbey: 12/20)

Plot: The story of Moses, told ad nauseum.

Sorry this installment of the Oprah Movie Club is arriving a little late. It has been a very long time since I saw this and had completely forgotten that it was told in real time like the 24 t.v. show. Seriously, Moses from his birth to his wandering off into the sunset after God told him, "Nuh uh! You ain't goin' to no promised land, Mo-fo-ses," all unfolding in real time.

I feel really bad for making my daughter watch this. I tricked her by telling her it was like an Indiana Jones movie, and then we didn't even get a shot of the Ark of the Covenant. That's right--no money shot! I thought that was a huge mistake. Abbey was confused about the overture and the guy coming from behind the curtain to chat with us at the beginning of the movie and then much much later, the intermission. I had to explain to her that going to the movies used to be a lot classier and that some of them would take up to half of a person's lifetime to watch.

Finally, there's a cool opening shot after the half hour of overtures, introductions, and opening credits. This movie's so big, and so much of it looks terrific. The colors pop, the set design is so big and expensive, and some of the special effects are very impressive. It's fun imagining a storyboard of this being shown to studio execs and having them laugh and say, "You've got to be kidding me!" The burning bush looks silly, and I know I'm probably going to hell for typing that, but it's true. You wait five hours and forty-seven minutes to see a spectacle, and that burning bush is the only reward? The snakes are a little cooler, and I liked the sanguine-ing of the river and the greenish Angel of Death mist although the latter could have been a lot cooler. That pull-back through the streets with that green smoky ooze was a cool shot though. I like what Cecil B. DeMille and his team's artistic and moody skies, but the piece de resistance is that parting of the Red Sea. Of course, the pillar of fire is weak, looking like something pulled straight from a G.I. Joe cartoon in the 80s. The obvious green screen, a random kid/master-of-the-obvious who tells everybody around him that the Red Sea has just been parted, and a guy who decides to poetically refer to God's nostrils try to take you away from the scene a little bit, but it's hard not to be impressed with the bigness of that special effect. My favorite part of it is a shot of three awe-struck women who, if he had any interest at all, Moses could have easily banged. And the Moses-standing-on-the-rock scene after the Hebrews get across is a nice movie moment. I also liked the set design for the Mount Sinai scene with God as a fire tornado and the Hebrew slaves--so many extras--showing us that they know how to party. I always liked, by the way, that they were breaking like two of the most important commandments while God was putting them on stone. But fire-stick duels, women riding men like horses, hot chick sacrificing. That's my kind of party although I really would have liked to see something closer to an orgy.

Yes, there's a ton of memorable scenes and fantastic imagery in the second half of the movie. The problem is that you have to wade through over five hours of character development to get there. You get an hour long scene of Moses talking to some sheep, and then they skim over two-thirds of the plagues? I wanted to see a frog rainstorm and cattle implosion or whatever else was in there. Sure, they mention "all manner of plagues," but we don't get to see them. And there's a lot of stagy acting with miscast actors. I do like Yul Brynner as Rameses and, of course, Vincent Price as Baka, but Ian Keith was pretty awful as Rameses' dad and Edward G. Robinson looked like he couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing there. Anne Baxter's a little hottie, at least from certain angles, as Nefretiri, and I nudged Abbey at one point to tell her that I wouldn't mind using Nefretiri as my footstool before realizing she was not the right audience for that. For the most part, it seems like everybody in this is just playing dress up. Charlton Heston wasn't a terrible Moses though. In fact, he's very convincing as Baby Moses, and I wasn't even sure it was him there. He's good as Old Man Moses, too, as he looked more and more like a crazy messenger of God. He gets to say all kinds of cool Moses things in that strong voice of his.

A question: Why does Aaron do all the stuff with the staff? Moses is holding the staff, and he's the voice of God and all, so shouldn't he get to do the magic tricks? But every time, he hands the staff to his brother. Did I miss something when I was fast-forwarding over a scene where Yul Brynner looks pensive for 25 minutes?

Is it just me or does it seem like every time the narrator comes in, it almost seems like he had to be awakened to read his lines?

There are a couple performers who steal scenes with small performances. First, there's Rameses's kid played by Eugene Mazzola, a bad child actor. "Mother, he turned a staff into a cobra." Mazzola's also in Terror in a Texas Town, that Western featuring a gun vs. harpoon show-down at the end. There's also a slave who dies in the mud, and his reaction to being whipped was awesome. Oh, and an old lady who says, "The Chariot! Ahh! Run for your lives!" It's great enough on its own, but I loved the little pose she struck afterward.

Did you know that Herb Alpert is in this movie, a drummer during the Mount Sinai scene? Not sure if the Tijuana Brass is in there. If they were, I might have gotten that orgy that I wanted!

Another question: What's the jackal and hound game they're playing in this? It looked like a blast.

Oh, another question: How many extras do you think were killed during the erection of the obelisk scene? That just didn't look safe.

So there are many spectacular moments in this Biblical epic, but that burning bush should have been in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. If I ever watch it again, that's probably where I'll start it anyway.

Too bad DeMille died after this one. I would have really enjoyed seeing a five-hour version of that story about Jesus meeting the little guy in the tree.

Oprah Movie Club Pick for September: Showgirls

1995 stripper movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Nomi, a long-legged gal with a troubled past, hitches a ride to Las Vegas in order to become a showgirl. She makes some friends and pushes her way to the top, similarly to those ballerinas in that Black Swan movie.

I was a Saved by the Bell fan just like everybody else. Wait a second. Was? I was, am, and will always be a Saved by the Bell fan, or a Bell Head as we call ourselves. And like all the other teenage male Bell Heads, I wanted to everybody on the show naked, probably in this order: Jesse, Kelly, Mr. Belding, Lisa, Screech, everybody else. So this was a dream come true, an answer to our perverted prayers. You get to see every inch of Jesse in this movie. But you know what? It's too much. I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but this movie has almost too much nudity. After a while, she'd start to strip and I'd sigh and say, "Great. Elizabeth Berkley is stripping again." It probably doesn't help that she appears to have been made out of plastic in this movie. And either she's a terrible actor or this was just the wrong part for her or, most likely, a combination of those. I'm really not even sure if she can dance. She certainly moves around fast, especially during the scene where she's dancing with the black guy in the club and looks like she's having an epileptic fit. She spends as much of this movie angry as she does naked (sometimes she's naked and angry), and she really doesn't play angry very well, probably because she's just so polished. And I really never fully understand her motivation or why she's so angry and why she loses her temper so quickly and easily. I was probably distracted by all the nipples though. I'm just never able to buy "tough girl" with her. However, all the bad with her character and Berkley's performance is erased when you see her eat a hamburger at around the 45 minute mark. It's magical. "Thanks for the hamburger!" Right at the hour and thirty-four minute mark, there's some hamburger parallelism, and you can try your hardest to unravel the symbolic layers of that pair of hamburgers but you'll eventually give up and concentrate on where Henrietta Bazoom's boob-poppin'-out-of-dress-wardrobe-malfunction-complete-with-honking-sound-effect trick would fall in a list of Best Movie Moments Ever.

This movie isn't just bad; it's classically bad. At times, it nearly seems intentional, the kind of bad that can't happen accidentally. There's the guy in the truck who bookends Nomi's story, a character whose driving is almost as bad as his acting. I love how he says, "It was a bad idea!" Early in the movie, there's one of those big movie moments when Jesse runs across a street and nearly gets hit by several cars. It was right after some puking, puking that I think must have been inspired by the movie's score. Those kinds of moments usually happen at the ends of the movies. This one was at the five minute and forty second mark. Oh, and then again at six minutes and ten seconds. There's naked volcano dancing, a show that lasts about two minutes, after which the crowd--probably disappointed that they spent so much money to see a two-minute naked volcano dance--asked for an encore. There's a scene with a ring pop. There's the "I wanna see your ass" guy. There's a character who actually says, "You want a knuckle sandwich?" There's the red-headed Patrick Bristow who played the Wig Master in a Seinfeld episode who at first I thought was named Gay in this but who turned out to be Marty instead. His "THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT! THRUST IT!" was award-worthy. There are monkeys, and then more monkeys, and then a sweet catfight in the vicinity of the monkeys. There's a doggy chow conversation and a tender moment involving cheese. Oh, and some great child acting."Can we see the  monkeys?" "Mommy, she said the f-word!" And, of course, a whole lot of nudity. And Kyle MacLachlan.

The best thing about it, for me at least, is that it seems to have been written by somebody not quite as talented as the folks who penned all those Saved by the Bell episodes. These lines are golden:

--"If it happens again, to anybody, you're going to jump to your conclusion. Without your golden parachute."
--"It must be weird not having anybody cum on you."
--Almost everything Henrietta Bazoom says. Her character might have broken a record for saying the word "twat" in one movie, by the way.
--Almost every conversation Jesse and her friend have but especially the one they have about chips and fingernails.
--"She wants to smile her snatch. She probably cut [the g-string] herself." There's no way I wrote that down right. Or did I?
--"Look at these tits. What are they--watermelons? This is a stage, not a patch."
--I want my nipples to press but I don't want them to look like they're levitatin'."

I'm sorry that this isn't more coherent, but the movie isn't all that coherent either. It is sleazy though. It's the type of movie you wouldn't want to eat off of. It's a ball of sleaze covered in three more layers of sleaze. But if nothing else, it does teach you an important lesson--you gotta gamble if you're gonna win. Not that it worked well for Elizabeth Berkley's career.

Oprah Movie Club Pick for August: Bride of Frankenstein

1935 comedy

Rating: 17/20

Plot: This filmed version of Mary Shelley's lesser-known sequel to her horror classic is about a monster's search for love and friendship. A perverse evil scientist who dines in tombs for some reason dreams of stitching together the titular bride for the big guy while he stumbles around and works on his social skills.

There's no way that I saw this as the brilliant black comedy that it is the first time I watched it way back when I was a kid. It seems like a daring decision by the Universal people--making a comedic sequel to their successful film based on classic literature. It works so well though. The movie still has scenes that create ominous moods and are borderline creepy. I like how the various castle rooms look, and the mist-drenched cemetery is a great set despite Karloff stumbling around and knocking over obviously fake statues. I also really liked the climactic "She lives!" scene, the stormy montage that shows off all that scientific equipment, a couple kites, and odd-angled close-ups of the two doctors' faces. And Dr. Preposterous says cool things like "Raise the cosmic diffuser!" [Note: If I ever write another song, that'll be it's title.] during that scene. I just love the look of this movie so much--each and every gnarled tree, cobweb, shadow, slimy step, gray fog blanket, and stone wall. There's also a scene where an old woman dummy is thrown into some water while a bemused fake owl looks on. I liked the owl the first time they showed it blinking, but I fell in love with it the second time. It's actually the most realistic animal in this movie other than the very real sheep; a lone fake bat looked like a elementary school student's art project.

But directly after the first shot--a wonderful zoom that leads the viewer into a mansion where the trio of British Romantic authors are hamming it up--the tone is tongue-and-cheek. Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) really overdoes things here, trilling those R's like he thinks it will help him get in Mary Shelley's pants or something. The montage that gives necessary the necessary background of the first story is really cool, some shockingly beautiful imagery there. And then we meet Millie who, if this was a straight horror flick, would singlehandedly ruin the entire experience. Millie's played by Una O'Connor, and she's a character who, during her initial scene where she's digging on some fire, you just know is not going to stick around the movie very long. What the hell is she doing with her voice in these early scenes? Or her eyes? It might just be because this is a Frankenstein movie, but she really reminded me of Marty Feldman. There's a moment where she tells another character to cross herself before walking out of the picture for what you just know has to be the last time since no director in his right mind would put this actress in multiple scenes in this movie, and I'm not sure how she didn't pull a muscle doing it. She crossed herself like she thought it would help her get in Lord Byron's pants or something. But then, the viewer discovers that Millie is a real character, like the sixth or seventh one on the cast of characters. She just keeps finding her way into every scene. There's one scene where she "washes her hands" of the monster stuff and leaves only to randomly pop up and start screaming in the next scene where they carry a body in. Millie's freakin' ubiquitous! And annoying, almost in a good way. And suddenly, there's a big chase scene with a lynch mob armed with sticks and wooden rakes, and there's Millie again, all ready to cackle and be louder than everybody else. I do like how she says "burgomaster" though.

Millie's not the only goofy character. I couldn't stop laughing at Dr. Pretorius's antics. And I love how he said "tissues" during the "You think I'm mad?" scene after he showed Henry his little people in bottles. What the hell's going on there? Let's have the mad scientist show off his little people in bottles and then suggest to Henry Frankenstein that they do something completely different from that. And I loved how Henry didn't seem amused, interested, surprised, or really anything while looking at the little people. I bet Dr. Pretorius was a little disappointed in that. I wouldn't mind having my own little ballerina in a bottle, by the way, and I'm adding it to my Christmas list. I also liked how Ernest Thesiger's Pretorius said "wizard," and his toast "to a new world of gods and monsters" is something I'm going to steal if there's ever an opportunity for me to make a toast. Henry's expression after that toast is priceless. "What? I ain't drinking to that!" You just know that Dr. Pretorius can't be trusted. For one, he's a total pervert. You know he's only interested in making a bride for the monster so that he can watch them do it. Now I'm not saying I wouldn't do the same thing if I had a laboratory like that and a couple of kites, but there's just something wrong with using science to create your own elaborate pornography. His creepiest line: "I hope her bones are firm." I'm not sure it's the words there as much as it is Thesiger's delivery. Pretorius also has Gene Wilder's hair. Oh, you also can't trust Pretorius because you catch him in a fib in this movie. He tells Frankenstein that alcohol (I think gin) is his only weakness and later tells the monster that cigars are his only weakness. You're not fooling me, Dr. Pretorius.

Of course, Karloff gets to play the funniest character. Every single scene in which he tries to interact with other characters is just hilarious, all grunting and awkward arm waving. The scene with the blind hermit shifts from touching to comic and back again. The monster learns the word "bread" and then takes a giant bite which disappears about three seconds later. And wine? You show me a human being who can watch the monster drink without laughing. And then smoking? This blind hermit is certainly a bad influence on the monster. There's a great bit of comedy when a couple lost guy's walk into right before the blind hermit and Frankenstein's monster are about to make love. One of the guy's says, "He isn't human! Frankenstein made him out of dead bodies! The hermit says, "This is my friend," and the other guy responds with, "Can't you see? Oh. . ." What's with Frankenstein's vocabulary, by the way? He seems to learn words awfully quickly, doesn't he? I fully expected the big guy to say, "Do you have bolts on your nipples or are you just happy to see me?" when he meets his bride. She's terrific by the way with all those jerky motions. The camera angles capture the titular bride's sexy charms, and I enjoyed watching the doctors raise her table up with her in that form-fitting gauze. And that hair! The meeting between monster and mate actually reminded me of when I met my wife:

Guy monster: Friend?
Girl monster: (bird squelch noise...head jerks)
Guy monster: Friend? (weird hand motions)
Girl monster: (screaming)
Guy monster: She hate me.
Girl monster: (a lovely wet hissing noise)

Who puts a self-destruct "leever" in their laboratory anyway? That seemed like a poor choice.

One more thing--the music in this is really too much, but I liked it anyway. It gives simple moments this grandiose theatrical feel, like the rising notes when Dr. Pretorius's shadow comes into the room after we first meet him. There are a few moments where the music almost seems inappropriate though, most memorably during the scene where Pretorius is giving the monster some wine in the tomb while they're checking out some bones. That, friends, is not a euphemism.

Barry picked this classic horror-comedy for us to watch, so you can thank him. I'm glad he did because it had been a very long time for me.

Oprah Movie Club Pick for June: Johnny Suede

1991 movie

Rating: 16/20 (Mark: 18/20)

Plot: The titular wanna-be teenage idol is missing that little special something to complete him. Luckily for him, that something--a pair of black suede shoes--lands on top of a phone booth he is using. As he works to get his band going, he juggles a relationship with a woman who already has a creepy photographer boyfriend, another relationship with a teacher of special needs students, and chicken-eating time with albino rock star Freak Storm.

Here are some of director Tom DiCillo's memories of making Johnny Suede which I found interesting. One of the things I really like about this movie is that it's a classic example of a director doing a whole lot of cool things with not a lot of money. Link Wray's guitar during the opening credits automatically sets this great mood, the kind of music that--for me at least--gives the story this almost timeless quality, and then it almost clashes with this weird cheap post-apocalyptic world littered with Christmas decorations, one where people go to discotheques with underpants on their heads and lizards roam freely the landscape of a pompadoured young man's subconscious. Johnny's sort-of nightmare fairy tale world is like a slightly less-sinster, wackier, and more comedic David Lynch world. Not that David Lynch's movies aren't funny. Johnny Suede is just more overtly funny, I think.

I do think this movie is hilarious, and since you could get away with calling it a romantic comedy, I'd say it's one of the more satisfying and funniest examples of the genre. Nick Cave's offer of chicken is one of those scenes that makes me laugh a little bit while I'm typing about it. I also loved the scene where Darlette doesn't like Johnny's Ricky Nelson single and asks if he's got anything else. He says he does and flips the record over. She asks for Freak Storm (believe it or not, that's only the second coolest name in the movie), he gets irritated and criticizes the plant she gave him ("Why would I give you a dead plant?"), she leaves, he catches Flip Doubt (there's the coolest) peeking through a curtain, he runs after her, she's just waiting in the shadows downstairs anyway, he says he's going out, she asks him if she can wait until he gets back and then goes upstairs, he ponders the situation, and then Ricky Nelson starts playing again. That is a little bit of comedy genius, such a well-written little joke that also manages to add a little bit to the pair of characters. The long scene in which Deke and Johnny make a pros/cons list is also very funny. The "Sorry I rip you shit" picture that Yvonne's student made Johnny also cracks me up, but not as much as Pitt's reaction to first his reading and then Keener's explanation. And for whatever reason, I just love this dialogue:

Deke: "When we gonna get the band started?"
Johnny: "I just told you, man--as soon as we get a gun."

Oh, and there's this one:

Darlette: "With those shoes on, you remind me of a prince in a fairy tale."
Johnny: "Yeah, well with that pink dress, you remind me of a strawberry ice cream cone."

So romantic. But with a lesser cast, this wouldn't have worked. The dialogue, which is admittedly dopey or corny, would have come across as nothing but dopey or corny. But I love the way the actors play it straight with this almost soap-opera delivery of the lines. Along with the aforementioned cheapness of the location, it gives the film this style that I really like--like a withered soap opera. I had seen Brad Pitt in a couple films before this one, and I was not impressed at all. When I saw this for the first time, I didn't get it and thought he was pretty awful here, too. But upon a second viewing, you don't need to look further than that opening scene where he's giving himself this look in the mirror to realize how good he is at creating this character, and he's about perfect as this naive man-child thing. He's got the look (and the hair apparently) to create this confident outer shell, this facade, but on the inside, he is fragile and gooey and really immature. He unfortunately reminds me of Hayden Christensen on Naboo during the "Suede is a funny thing" speech though, and I probably could have survived with less shots of Pitt in those ill-fitting and holey underpants. Alison Moir (Darlette) nails that soap opera actress thing, and she's cute as a button. And that accent? Oh, my--it'll melt you! If you look closely and are as perverse as I am, by the way, you can catch a brief nipple. Watching the scene where she comes to Johnny's pad for a date, gives him socks, and then announces that she has to go makes me think she should have had a great career playing characters in romantic comedies. And Catherine Keener? Any close readers of my blog (not sure I have any of those) know that I have a thing for Keener anyway. She's just so good here, something a little more real and human than the others. There's hurt there, a little confidence, a lot of fear, and this upperhand in this fledgling relationship with this new guy, and you can see it all in those wonderful eyes of hers. I love the look she gives Johnny after she and he share a "real kiss," and she's incredible in that "watermelon seed" scene. I'm not sure what's going on with her hair in this though. Calvin Levels is another who should have had a much bigger career after this. Hell, he could have been a Huxtable! He's good as Deke and has a great smile. Deke, by the way, was almost Steve Buscemi, but there's no way Buscemi would have been able to pull off that sweet spin move during the bands rehearsal in that freezing abandoned warehouse or wherever it was. And you've got Nick Cave who only needs to succeed at being a presence in this movie, stand out and draw attention to himself. He does that really well, and that whole scene with Johnny and Freak Storm in the alley is a lot of fun. You get Samuel L. Jackson in a very tiny but very cool role as Bebop, a badass with a standup bass. Love this dialogue:

Bebop: " I seen a cat cut half in two once."
Conan the accordionist (played by a potential Torgo Award winning Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim): "You saw it happen?"
Bebop: "No, but I seen 'em put in two bags though."

And then the band plays, and they sound like they could have gone places if Bebop wouldn't have run off or if Deke or Johnny had more talent or if Conan the accordionist would have had a more prominent role. The original songs in this are a lot of fun, by the way. The song about eating a carrot for breakfast should have been a hit. "Never Girl" is great both before and after Deke "gasses up the tempo," and Freak Storm's "Mama's Boy" song is sad and beautiful. Oh, and the landlord's improvised "Hey, Hey, Today's the Day" is pretty wonderful, too.

There are a lot of little things that I like about Johnny Suede that really make it one of those movies that make it easy to overlook its flaws--you know, like the completely unnecessary narrator--and keep it on my list of movies that I'd call a sentimental favorite. There's the Terror in Tiny Town reference and Pitt's "Even the horses are midgets!" There's Peter McRobbie's pasty, lurking Flip Doubt who really does like he wandered off the set of Lost Highway or Blue Velvet. There's a great tiny performance by a guy named Ahmed Ben Larby as an angry taxi driver. I looked up his filmography. He's got only seven roles, but one of them (in The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Keifer Sutherland) is playing another taxi driver. And there's one of my favorite movie midgets (again, that's only for the alliteration, so calm down, little people) ever with Joseph Barry using an antenna to look at Catherine Keener's undergarments. I can identify, little fellow. Johnny Suede is the only feature-length film he's acted in, but he was Haley Joel Osment's stand-in for The Sixth Sense and he did stunts in The Royal Tenenbaums. And those three surreal dream sequences with lizards, exploding windows, a shot of a lizard and a gun that looks like it could have been a still from Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, a naked old guy? Far out.

But what's this movie about? Identity? Is it a coming-of-age story? There's a lot about time in this movie, and Johnny is almost an anachronism. "I'm not into now," he says. "Now is a fly's fart in the wind." Later, he claims that "Good music has no time." What's time do to characters like Johnny? There's also a lot of symbolism or possible symbolism in this movie, and I just don't get it all despite having seen this several times, twice in the last month. What do you think about the following?

--shoes--the "one thing missing"--shoes thrown and shoes lost?
--Johnny's guitar--what's that represent for the protagonist?
--the hairdryer that doesn't work
--the gun
--painting, the job that Deke and Johnny do really really well
--that hand he finds in the street and its twin on the "Be a bank teller" sign in the subway
--the plant that might have been dead when Darlette gave it to him
--the girlfriends themselves--what do Darlette and Yvonne represent for Johnny?
--signs--an exit sign and a "dead end" street sign in the background
--Johnny's puking after singing the song Freak Storm gave him (or was that just the chicken)

So, friends--what did you think of our Oprah Movie Club pick for this month?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for May: Schinder's List

1993 Best Picture

Rating: 18/20 (Jen: 18/20; Dylan: 11/20)

Plot: Businessman Oskar Schindler saves a bunch of Jews during the Holocaust. He's rewarded with a tree and a bunch of rocks and, long after he's gone, a movie that nobody will want to see because it isn't even in color.

So here's my question: Why were so many details changed? They're not significant details--the girl in the red dress, based on a real person apparently, survived the Holocaust--but doesn't it damage the integrity of the film? Even a minor rewrite is still a rewrite of history, isn't it? Isn't that what Inglorious Basterds is kind of about? It makes me question the historical accuracy of other things that happen in the movie, like when Fiennes character is shooting at people from his balcony.

Here's something else I wanted to bring up. Here's what filmmaker Terry Gilliam had to say about Schindler's List: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAKS3rdYTpI

It's a two minute clip. I know Cory made us watch a five-hour movie this month, but you can spare two more minutes to see what Mr. Gilliam has to say, right? I have my own thoughts, but I wanted to see what you had to say.

Another question: Spielberg refused to take any money for making this, and he doesn't sign any memorabilia related to the movie. That's noble and all, but a stronger move would have been to keep his name off the screen during the closing credits. Or at least not end his movie with a powerful scene of Schindler's Jews giving him rocks and then immediately splash "Directed by Steven Spielberg" on the screen after it.

I saw this in a crummy theater in Terre Haute when it came out, back before they'd invented devices that would enable my wife to check Facebook during the movie. Now I'm not completely sure about this, but I think that makes her almost as bad as a Nazi. Of course, Dylan only rated this an 11, not even twice as good as Dr. Strangelove, so he's probably going straight to hell. He called it "boring," and it is too long, arguably longer than it needs to be. If I had to cut anything at all, I'd maybe lose the big chunk where Goeth is going through a "pardoning" stage after that lengthy conversation that Qui Gon has with Goeth's maid. I guess I know what a scene where Goeth gets a manicure adds to the Schindler's List experience, but it could have been cut without losing much. It certainly is a long movie, but most of what you see on the screen needs to be there. I don't think our director wants humanity to get away without seeing some of this imagery. It's the same reason why people should have to read Night, almost like an act of penance. Also, this much time is needed to make what Schindler does realistic and comprehensible. You lose some of the space this movie gives the Schindler character, and you lose the real person that he was. And speaking of that real person, I'm happy this leaves in some of his defects. What we find out first about the man is that he was a selfish womanizer, and I think that's important. Neeson's so good here, both with those aforementioned flaws and the more emotional bits as Schindler transforms into the person who deserves to have a movie made about him. Fiennes makes a scary villain, a much scarier (and nosier) one than Lord Voldemort could ever have been. Just as Neeson gives the titular character some real flesh 'n' blood, Fiennes also gives his character, a character who puts a face and name on the evil and gives us something more specific to hate, some unfortunate humanity. And he's so matter-of-fact about it all. It's frightening. It's a brave part for him to grab at the age of 30-something, mostly because he's so good at being pure evil that people might not want to see his face on the screen ever again. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (CORRECTION: No, he did not. And neither did John Malkovich.), and if there was an Academy Award for Best Paunch, he would have gotten that, too. As evil as that character is, he did give me a pick-up line that I'll probably use once I leave my wife for getting on Facebook during Schindler's List and will need to find a replacement wife--"I realize you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word. . ." I don't think many women would be able to resist that.

One other question: Did they really say "fuck" that much in 1940's Poland? This is a legitimate question. It's a word with a fuzzy history.

Spielberg gives us a lot of pictures that are impossible to get out of your head. The handheld camera work during a lot of this startles. True, some of these visuals just seem too easy, the kind of stuff that a director who knows his name will be the first thing you see after the last image of the film might think will get him that Academy Award. The camera lingers on children, and piles of shoes or pictures, concentration camp atrocities, and dying extras get more than enough screen time. The ghetto scene is absolutely brutal. The little boy with the ears trying to find a hiding spot and the shot of him spotlighted in that desperate situation he decides upon is impossible to forget. Of course, there's the girl in the red coat. Ashes, the slow river of blood fighting through snow, the ominous crematorium chimney. One of my favorite moments is in the hospital when the nurse poisons some patients. One woman's grateful expression and that nurse's look of defiance when the SS arrive are both so beautiful. It's powerful film-making, and there aren't a lot of people who can watch this and feel nothing.

One more thing--I think it's a little sad that I have to look up the name of the accountant/factory-manager. It's Itzhak Stern. Maybe it's just me being bad with names.

My thoughts about Gilliam's thoughts: What are you going to leave this movie remembering the most? Is it a Holocaust movie or a movie about how one person can make a difference? Do you think about how evil humanity is as the credits roll or are you remembering the goodness of one human being? If it's the former with those three questions, Gilliam might have a point.

OK, your turn. What do you want to say about our Oprah Movie Club selection for May?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for April: The Muppets

2011 Muppet movie that can't be called The Muppet Movie because there already is a movie called that

Rating: 15/20 (Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 19/20)

Plot: The aptly-named Tex Richman is about to buy the land upon which sits the former Muppet studios because he wants to drill for oil there. When Gary, his girlfriend Mary, and his little felt brother Walter find out while vacationing in Hollywood, they find Kermit to let him know and help him reunite the Muppets for a telethon to raise money to save the studio. Those curmudgeons who always sat in the balcony crack wise.

I have to get this out of the way before I type anything else--I've always loved the Muppets and probably always will. I love them unapologetically and unconditionally. If Scooter bounced over to me and hit me squarely in the groin with a baseball bat, I would grimace and fall down writhing in pain and ask, "Scooter, what was that for?" but it wouldn't keep me from loving the Muppets. I think it's the texture of their "skin" that I like so much. And it looked great in this movie--you could see the felt, and all the colors of these colorful characters, especially when they filled the screen with their movements all at once, just hit my nostalgic sweet spot and made the child within me giggle. I don't want to go on and on about the material Muppets are made of; I'm not a pervert or anything.

This really is a movie that's all about nostalgia. I can't imagine a fan of the brilliant television show or the other movies hating this despite some flaws. It's true to the original stuff and, at least I think, the overall vision of Jim Henson. There's some self-referential stuff peppered in the script and a fan favorite song playing over the closing credits. All of the characters show up except for that John Denver Muppet, and the new character, though possibly guilty of being a little on the bland side, is just too likable not to like a little bit. Really, I wanted to give Walter a noogie. Not that I'm a pervert or anything. It was great seeing all the characters in something a little more traditionally Muppety than the parodies they've appeared in more recently. The start of their big show with their theme song nearly jerked tears from me!

The humor's also slap-happy meta-, and Muppet-esque, and although Muppet-esque humor probably isn't for everybody, I laughed more during this than I've laughed at anything for a long time. I laughed like a little boy, too. I laughed at Muppet teeth, a robot offering Tab and New Coke, Swedish Chef subtitles (and that "Say hello to my little friend" reference was so funny), a human replacement for Animal in Fozzie's Moopet band (Dave Grohl, the first of two Nirvana references), Punch Teacher, Tex's unlikely and surprising burst into a rap song, hip-hop Fozzie's "Wakka Wakka," and the barbershop quartet version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which was about the best thing I've ever heard in a movie and my new second movie scene that takes place in a barbershop. That's right, Chaplin still has the top spot.

This is a Muppet musical, and I actually enjoyed the songs. There was one nice nod to a song from an earlier movie (I won't give it away, but it has to do with rainbows and connecting) that was beautifully done, sonically and visually. The duet about being a "Muppet Man" or a "Manly Muppet" managed to be both touching and hilarious.

Jason Segal and Amy Adams were both potentially bothersome, but they were fine here. I enjoyed Segal especially with this wide-eyed "Holy cow! I'm in a freakin' Muppet movie!" look that he had throughout this thing. You expect and at times put up with all the cameos, just like you kind of have to wade through a few terrible jokes to get to the really funny parts. The story was ok but predictable, but there were an awful lot of side plots. So many stories! This also almost overflows with themes, and although a lot of those themes really connect, it almost seems too ambitious at times.

Still, I'm not complaining about anything I saw here, and I was enormously entertained by this. And I am thrilled that this Muppet comeback wasn't completely screwed up.

Oprah Movie Club for March: Paprika

2006 anime

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 12/20)

Plot: Some fiend's stolen a dream machine, and it's up to a scientist and her titular alter-ego to save humanity. Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn't nearly smart enough to figure out what the hell was going on here.

But I liked what I was looking at! This stretches the elastic boundaries of what animation can do, dips deep inside the old noggin, scrambles things around, and leaves you baffled but aesthetically pleased. I thought the story was frustratingly incoherent, but that might not be the movie's fault. Then again, my brother's reasonably intelligent and was also confused, so maybe it was the movie's fault. He's not seen Inception, a film that seems to have borrowed a lot of this one's ideas--Jello floors, elevator rides through the subconscious, frog musicians. I have seen Inception which might have given me an advantage although I did have an extra obstacle in trying to avoid thinking about Leonardo Dicaprio. The guy's just dreamy. On second thought, I'm not sure there were frogs in Inception. I think part of the problem for me (and again, keep in mind that I'm a dumb guy) is that I had trouble understanding the motivations of most of the characters. There's a character we never really get to meet who befuddled me, and the villain's logic never really made much sense to me. But again, I did appreciate the manic creativity and goofy surrealism, and cartoon nudity always is good for a bonus point or two. I don't see how there could have possibly been enough room on a storyboard for all the ideas that show up on screen here. You get walking refrigerators, giant headed guys, butterfly girls, talking dolls, musical animals. The screen's just filled with this stuff, and even though a lot of the imagery was redundant, I looked forward to seeing that parade. As much as I enjoyed the cartoon visually, however, I hated it aurally. The soundtrack, other than the cute and unhinged parade music, was irritating. A lot of times, I watch a movie like this (Synecdoche, New York; anything from Czechoslovakia; You've Got Mail) and think that if I just watched it a second time, I'd understand it all a lot better. I think I could watch Paprika a dozen times and still not figure out what was going on.

OK, what other Oprah Movie Clubbers got a chance to see this one? What did you think?

Oprah Movie Club: Once Upon a Time in the West

1968 Western

Rating: 19/20

Plot: Some guy who might have a name travels the Wild West in search of some talented musicians to complete a band he wants to start--The Belt and Suspenders Blues Band. At the beginning of our story, he's got himself on lead harmonica, and all he needs to complete the band are a back-up harmonica, a gitfiddle, a drummer, a stand-up bass, a washboard, a bottle blower, a harpist, a bassoonist, a tromboner, another tromboner, an accordionist, a piano player, a lead singer, four mildly-attractive women for back-up singers, a beat-box, and another back-up harmonica player. Meanwhile, a guy who's usually a good guy but in this movie is a bad guy has been sent by a guy with his own train to scare a nerd with "the worst hair west of the Mississippi" and either does a really poor job or a really good job. Then, his wife--Boobsy McWhoresalot--shows up and starts distracting everybody. She realizes that her honeymoon is likely ruined and makes some coffee. A bunch of ugly guys are shot, and it all builds up to a thrilling climax when a dying man pats Boobsy on her sweet sweet behind.

"How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders?"

See, I didn't remember this movie had a character who wore both a belt and suspenders. There was a line in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole about belts and suspenders and a line in a novel that will remain unfinished because I'm too much of a dumbass to write a stinking chapter of it with a character who wears both. I might need a "belt and suspenders" blog label. Can you imagine Nicolas Cage playing a character who wore both a belt and suspenders? Pants would literally be shat!

Did everybody but me know that Dario Argento co-wrote this?

There's more goodness in the first fifteen minutes of this thing than most directors can dream of putting together in their entire careers. Bird taunting, whistling metal, a stutterer, veins on a dark hand, a ticket flying right into my living room. Under the direction of Leone, I'm pretty sure I could have watched these characters sit around and do absolutely nothing for two hours and forty minutes or so, all scenery and glorious sound effects. I'm not sure who's decision it was--Morricone's or Leone's--to not have music over the opening scene at the train station. If it was the composer's decision, this might be his best work. And that's saying a ton. This movie doesn't need to go anywhere. You've got a screen packed with details, and you just want to absorb it all. There are chunks of this movie where it's barely a moving picture. The pace is leisurely, and that allows us to just savor it. It's more a summertime movie pace, but it's the kind of pace I love, especially when there's so much to look at. Of course, contrast the overall pace to the blink-and-you-miss-it climactic gun fight.

I also love the character's dynamics and the often confusing relationships. They operate with these unwritten rules, this code that shows that Leone's version of the Wild West has this underlying structure. In fact, you almost wonder what samurai movie Leone lifted the story and its characters from. The characters, by the way, are just so complete. You don't need their back stories. All it takes a few moments on the screen and a few lines of dialogue and you just get them. Bronson ain't Eastwood, but everything he says is so cool. Fonda makes a great bad guy (love his sinner's smile), and Claudia Cardinale is so cute that I'll likely dream about patting her behind myself. Robards' Cheyenne is a complex and tragic figure. And they all get their own music! The periphery characters fill in the gaps. As Scott commented (premature commentation, by the way, but I'll allow it), Elam's "wandering eye" is a nice little detail, but really all of these characters' faces twitch or contort in ways that mine can't. I should know because I spent some time in front of the mirror trying to look tough after watching this movie. Leone's really put together a Who's-Who of Grizzled Guys. He sure loves his close-ups.

My favorite moment: Fonda searching Morton's train while the camera pans over a ground littered with dead bodies. When Fonda exits, it's almost enough to convince you that Leone was the greatest director ever. As I type this, I can think of about fifteen other favorite moments or shots in this.

This is a big movie, successful as a Western revenge epic or as an ode (or maybe an elegy) to the American West. Poetic and shockingly beautiful.

I should add that the way Charles Bronson holds that harmonica is perfect.

Oprah Movie Club: Joe vs. the Volcano

1990 romantic comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: The titular loser's stuck in a dead-end and depressing job in the depths of a gray building where artificial testicles, amongst other things, are made. As a hypochondriac, he makes frequent trips to the doctor. He complains that he doesn't feel right, and a doctor informs him that he has brain cloud and only five to six months to live. Joe quits his job with style and takes a secretary out. The next day, an eccentric gazillionaire shows up and makes Joe a proposition. He wants to pay for Joe to travel to a Pacific Island and throw himself in a volcano so that he can get his hands on a mineral needed to make superconductors. Yeah, I'm not sure that made much sense either. Joe agrees, buys a lot of stuff with Ossie Davis, and then begins his journey.

So how cute is that Meg Ryan? I've always been apathetic when it comes to Meg Ryan, but I was really impressed with the trio of characters she played here--the secretary, the flibbertigibbet (Full disclosure: I had to give this movie a bonus point for using flibbertigibbet.), and the yacht lady. Cute as a freakin' button, no? Tom Hanks? Well, I was distracted by his hair in this one, maybe even more than I was when I watched The Da Vinci Code. He's kind of like the straight man in this giant cosmic joke played on his character, and the performers around him, even though they're barely more than cameos, are memorable and a lot of fun. I always enjoy Dan Hedaya, and he's funny as Joe's boss with all those repeated lines about how so-and-so can get the job but can he do the job. Robert Stack plays the coolest-sounding doctor ever, Lloyd Bridges is hilarious as Graynamore, and it's always good to see Ossie Davis. The luggage salesman (Barry McGovern), Abe Vigoda, Nathan Lane. They're all great periphery characters. You really have to be willing to let go of the real world and just accept the way things happen in this movie, but if you do, I think this one's a rewarding experience. It's like a fairy tale with a little more depth, a story about letting go, taking chances, and living the big life that you've been given. It's probably too surreal and free-floating for the rom-com crowd and too goofy and Meg Ryan-y for a lot of people, but I thought it had enough giant dogs to make it worth anybody's time. And hammerhead shark puppets! That made me laugh. This one's worth watching multiple times, by the way, to catch some recurring imagery (check out that lampshade) and repeated lines (lots of "soul" stuff here).

Joe vs. the Volcano was Barry's pick for the Oprah Movie Club.

Oprah Movie Club Pick: Gamera vs. Guiron

1969 turtle superhero movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: As rumors of unidentified sort-of hovering objects swirl, a Japanese kid and Beaver Cleaver stumble upon an abandoned space craft constructed from cheap cardboard and what appears to be pieces of discarded stoplights. The ship takes off with the lads inside, leaving a whiny homely girl behind. While she tries to convince Mom that the boys did indeed fly off in a spaceship, the boys have landed on the tenth planet in our solar system (sorry, I didn't catch the name) where they watch some goofy monsters fight and are forced to endure the annoying voices of the planet's only inhabitants--two gals wearing capes. But these girls have a plan for the boys, and Gamera (a friend to children apparently) is needed to save the day.

Kent picked a classic for our first Oprah Movie Club pick of the year. There's one other Gamera movie on the blog, the superior but not nearly as much goofy or fun Gamera the Invincible. This one begins with some gross effects that look like they could serve as the backdrop for a really cheap Pink Floyd cover band, probably one called The Vegetable Men, and then makes us wait a while before we see any monster-on-monster action. The worst dubbing I think I've ever heard is enough to keep things entertaining though. It's not just the poorly-chosen voices for the characters either. No, there's something terribly wrong with the pacing in the delivery of the lines, almost like that guy from the "Hooked on Phonics" commercial who could barely get through a story about a train is reading everything. The child actors are irritating, but there's an adult actor who actually makes them look like master thespians in some early scenes where they're together. His name is Kon Ohmura, and I'm not sure how he Konned his way onto a movie set, but he's in another Gamera movie and a few other things. His character here (Goonjob? Coonja?) is there for comic relief, just like the rest of the movie, and Ohmura's wonderfully Torgorific as he's threatening to shave the children's heads [Spoiler Alert: That's foreshadowing!] or even just standing around. That's right. Ohmura's the type of actor who can't just stand there during a scene without being a complete distraction. That's talent, folks.

Finally, we get a Gamera sighting when the kids leave the earth's atmosphere. A nearly endless Gamera/spaceship race brings the action hard. You also get a close-up of the inside of Gamera's mouth (Do you ever get to see a close-up of the inside of Godzilla's mouth?) as he, I'm pretty sure, attempts to make out with the ship. But the best action sequence is the superbly realistic scene on that tenth planet between a metallic birdy thing and what I thought was a monster with three-fourths of a dolphin for a head but what actually turned out to be a monster with a knife for a head. Didn't find out until later that the latter was the menacing titular bad monster in this movie. It's not much of a fight. Guiron repels a cheap-looking yellow beam and dismembers the metallic birdy before doing a Jabba the Hutt impression. It's pretty badass and kind-of gruesome for a monster movie intended for children. But honestly, Guiron is so dumb looking that it's hard to take any of it seriously. He could have been raping my grandmother, and it wouldn't have seemed all that bad.

When our hero gets to the planet (because he's a friend of children, and there are children who need savin'), he gets beat up pretty good by the villain. He even bleeds some green stuff. He recovers later on, of course, probably because the producers of Gamera vs. Guiron weren't finished demonstrating their complete disregard for all things logical. First, the heroic turtle is on his back at the bottom of a lake and can't get up no matter how much the boys yell his name or how much he struggles. But then a giant rock hits him in the chin, a development that inexplicably gives him strength. The two battle again (hence the "vs." in the title), Gamera repeatedly racking himself and nearly teabagging Guiron before doing some gymnastics and, as one of the boys explains, "dancing go-go." I love it when Japanese monsters dance. The good guy wins, there's an improbable spaceship repair and some of the worst blue screen work you're likely to see this week, and we eventually get to a happy ending. It's really only happy because we get to see Goobjohn again.

I enjoyed the cheapo set design of the alien planet. It looked like a muted sci-fi train set. The interiors were probably borrowed from another cheap Japanese science fiction movie, and I'm sure the only requirement the casting director was looking for with the child actors was that they were well behaved enough to not run around and accidentally knock down a cardboard wall or two, an act that would have likely cost the studio tens of dollars. As Guiron tries to get to the children and destroys the building their in, large rocks fall all around and even on the children. They don't seem to harm the boys though thankfully, and that makes just as much sense as rocks falling from the ceiling of a building that looks to be made entirely of metal.

It all ends with a nice message about how the world could be a nice place without traffic accidents, the same thing Al Gore's been preaching for years. He probably saw this one actually. I don't know about you, but I was slightly aroused because of the squeaky-voiced alien chicks, even when they were threatening to "eat their brains raw." And you've got to dig the cutesy music. What is it with Japanese children's movies and irritating and inane sing-a-longs?

Oprah Movie Club Pick for August: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

1985 biopic, apparently in four chapters

Rating: 16/20 (Mark: 15/20)

Plot: It's the rockin' good times of the titular author, Yukio Mishima, a man all messed up in the head because he was forced to rub his grandmother's legs as a young boy. This weaves three of his stories/plays and his parallel life events before describing the details of his last day when he commits suicide after his buddies make fun of his Harry Caray impression. Or something. I really don't understand this culture at all.

This is one of the more challenging biographical movies you're likely to see. It's conveniently broken into four chapters, three which attempt to blend biography and Mishima's literature and one which matter-of-factly reenacts the man's final act. And by "convenient," I mean "not really all that convenient at all" since it's hard to connect the dots with the fragments of this guy's life. The styles and colors vary--the beautiful black and white of memory, the lavish and almost gaudy colors in the staged literature excerpts, and the realism of that final day. I don't think too many people will watch this and not think it's all beautifully filmed, the individual chunks of Mishima's story told in visually stunning ways rich with symbolism. My man Philip Glass's pulsating score adds to the experience. Striking. But for me (and maybe this is just because I'm a dumb guy), it was hard to put some of the pieces together, and there are times when it got a little boring. Mishima and his contradictions are hard to get your head around in this. He's a writer who doesn't believe in the power of words, a married homosexual, a guy with convictions that really aren't all that clear. All the actors playing Moshima do a fine job, especially Ken Ogata (the last Moshima) who also did a great job in the The Pillow Book where he played Ewan McGregor's penis. This is a pretty and intense movie, and it's a very good movie if you're in mood for a really complex story about a really complex guy. It's just not completely satisfying.

Trivia: Philip Glass only used two fingers when composing to score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.