Dead Man Walking

1995 piece of liberal propaganda

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Convicted murderer and rapist Matthew Poncelet has nothing to do but count down the days to his execution and write letters to nuns. Sister Helen Prejean answers his letter with a visit, later helping him find a way to work on an appeal and becoming his spiritual counselor. She later is forced to interact with the family of his victims.

I thought this was going to be just a bunch of left-wing nutjobs asking me to be sympathetic to violent criminals, but that's not quite what's going on here. Somebody pro-death penalty could claim that director Tim Robbins et. al. are making an anti-death penalty statement with this and probably get away with saying it. However, this is as objective a cinematic approach to an issue like this can get. The death sentence at the heart of this movie is seen from every angle--the guy sitting in death row, the victims' angry families, the folks who work in prison or death row, the nun torn by it all, and even the victims themselves. No matter what you think of capital punishment before the opening credits, I think this movie challenges you to think things over again. Not that it's here to change your mind or anything. But it is thought-provoking. The acting is really good universally (even Jack Black in what has to be one of the funniest movies of his career), but at the center of it all, you've got two of the most powerful lead performances in recent movie history. Susan Sarandon's Sister Helen is just the right amount of tortured, nothing but heroic as a woman of conviction. Her performance is deep and quietly passionate. Sean Penn is one of those actors who I always forget is any good at all. This is the perfect type of role for him since he looks like a scumbag anyway. His thick mumble is tough at times, but he's real good here in a very challenging role, forcing you to see the human being who's almost unrecognizable, smudged by his sins and hidden beneath layers of his own hatred. No, you won't end up liking that human being, unrepentant racist/murderer that he is, but you will find it impossible not to take notice of the human being. Such powerful performances, and the dialogue between them is rich and realistic and rewarding. Where this could have ended up manipulative and sanctimonious or overly didactic, it stays deeply moving and reflective. I was touched by more than a few scenes. I wish Robbins would have shown less of the crime. He intercuts jumpy dimly lit flashes of flashbacks in scenes with characters walking or whatever, and it almost gets to be a bit much at times. But I suppose I know why theses scenes are in there.

The Strongest Man in the World

1975 family fun

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Some dopey college doofuses throw some chemicals together in an attempt to do something to a cow. It gets mixed in with some cereal that one of them eats, and they discover that their concoction gives the user super strength for a limited period of time. This comes along at just the right time since the school is experiencing some financial difficulties. Some bad guys come along.

There aren't too many non-animated Disney features that I love or even like, and there are quite a few I wish would be wiped out of existence. That's right, Cat from Outer Space. I'm looking at you. This is somewhere in between. It's typical Disney family science fiction goofballery with some special effects being used for humorous purposes. As expected, there's nothing hysterically funny or memorable here. It's harmless (unlike The Cat from Outer Space) but incredibly boring. This is the type of family film that you watch and can't imagine a single member of the family actually enjoying it. There's too much story for children. There's no nudity or violence, so Dad's not going to like it. Mom doesn't really like movies that much anyway. Grandpa's dead. We don't allow Uncle Pete in the room when we watch movies because he can't keep his prosthetic hand out of his pants. And Aunt Bertha is confused by Kurt Russell. Speaking of Kurt Russell, he falls out of the movie halfway through and doesn't come back until the end. I'm not sure where he went because I yawned and lost track of the characters. I don't want to write anything else about this movie.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man

1951 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Bud and Lou graduate from detective school and are ready to solve some crimes. They get their first case when a boxer accused of murdering a manager arrives to get help in finding the real murderer. This particular boxer, Tommy Nelson, is also able to turn himself invisible and plans on using that ability to help them in their search.

Another misleading movie poster here. This movie isn't the riot it promises to be, and there is no scene where Abbott (or Costello since I don't care to know which is which) fondles a woman's left breast with his neck. The best thing about this is that they use the invisible man special effects, pretty much the same ones used almost twenty years before in The Invisible Man, in some creative and mildly humorous ways. The problem is that Abbott and Costello aren't really funny. I'm far from an expert on the history of comedic cinema, but surely this kind of comedy was dated by the time the early 50s rolled around. I can't think of anything else to write about Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man.

The Man in the Iron Mask

1998 Three Musketeers movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: King Leonardo the XIV isn't a very good king. In fact, he's an asshole, and nobody in France likes him except for one of the four musketeers who is sleeping with the queen mother. When King Leonardo makes a military decision based only on his sexual desires (a move he must have learned from reading about King David and Bathsheba), Musketeer Malcovich's son is killed in battle. The three musketeers who aren't sleeping with the queen mother decide to bust the man in the iron mask, Leonardo's brother Leonardo, out of prison and pull an ol' switcheroo.

If you were magically transported via a magical remote control and a time machine into this movie and asked anybody in France, "Hey, how's King Leonardo XIV working out for ya?" you would fall to sleep before the answer was finished because the Frenchman or Frenchwoman answering your question would deliver a verbose answer so monotonously that you'd think, "Oh, man. Is this answer ever going to get to an endmark?" and then decide to close your eyes for a little bit, just a little bit like you do sometimes when you're driving, but then fall fast asleep. The Man in the Iron Mask needed some of that bumpy pavement they put on the shoulders of highways so that the bumbabra-bumbabra-bumbabra noise wakes you up before you hit a tree, a ditch, or a hobo. I don't know whether to blame the dialogue, the bland music, or the acting, but this was just so stuffy. I normally like John Malcovich, but his uninspired performance here typifies what's wrong with this. He always performs his dialogue in a very deliberate Malcovichian way that ends up making the movie a lot longer, but here, it just seems like his character is struggling to get the words out, almost like he can't believe he used to be a musketeer but now has to say such boring things. He and the other musketeers (Irons, Depardieu, Byrne) each have moments where they shine, but more often than not, they overtheatricize and get all actor-y and make me think I'm watching performances instead of characters. And the biggest problem of all? I might be able to tolerate a single Leonardo Dicaprio in a movie, but this one has two. He plays two characters who not only look identical but act identical even though the story would seem to require that they don't have that much in common. I don't even know if Leonardo Dicaprio is a good actor or not, but I don't like him here one bit. I don't think the part(s) suit him, and I thought his face was tedious. This movie did get better as it went along, but it unfortunately went along a little too much. Or maybe a lot too much.

The Weather Man

2005 comedic character study

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Dave Spritz works for two hours a day and makes over two hundred thousand dollars a year. He tells Chicago what other people guess the weather is going to be like. He's no meteorologist, but he's got a pretty face and knows how to point at pictures of clouds or a sun with a smiling face. He's got a chance for a job as weather guy for a national morning program. However, Dave Spritz has some problems. He's separated from his wife, a woman who has already found his replacement. His son is on the drugs. His daughter's classmates call her Camel Toe. His father might be dying. People throw milkshakes at him.

I was actually shocked to see this labeled as a comedy on the poster up there. Sure, I laughed quite a bit while watching this, but I laugh at all Nicolas Cage movies whether they're supposed to be funny or not. Nicolas Cage's work provides more unintentionally comedy than the work of any other living actor. Now that I think about it, I can see The Weather Man as an intentional comedy, albeit a very dry, very deadpan, very dour one. And I can see Nicolas Cage as something close to a comedic genius. I'm starting to wonder if what I refer to as "Awkward Nicholas Cage Moments" (compare with Awkward Jimmy Stewart Moments and Awkward Vincent Price Moments) are intentionally awkward. The best example is a scene where he is chasing a car while holding a McDonalds apple pie. I always have problems accepting Cage as an Everyman, but here I think he works as a guy who, nearing the middle of his life, is having an extremely difficult time accepting that his life choices have dropped him smack dab in the middle of some kind of cruel cosmic joke. What always threatens to be trite and fluffy ends up wonderfully layered. It's thick with metaphor and really explores Spritz's life with a fine-toothed comb, just like all good character studies should. It refuses to answer all the questions, just like a lot of movies I usually like (see: A Serious Man, a similar movie [that might be a warning]), but allows the audience to make up its own mind about this dynamic character. It takes you through some difficult material, but I think Cage's performance and the humor snuck into it all makes it more digestible. Michael Caine plays Cage's father. I can't figure out why he's got an English accent, but aside from that, he's perfect. You can read so much in his character's face. The performance is deceptively simple and incredibly nuanced. There's a scene with Caine and Cage having a conversation in a car that, even though it had something incredibly cliched and silly tossed in, really touched me. And I love how Caine had to get his son to stop and define simple ordinary things during their conversations. "David, what is a Frosty?" It's the type of writing that seems like it's there to pass the time, but I thought it was great how these questions really forced Spritz to start examining some of those finer details of his life. This is one of those happy surprises, a movie I expected nothing from but ended up finding very rewarding. I was also surprised to see that Gore Verbinski directed this between a couple of those pirate movies. And long after he made the criminally underrated family-friendly masterpiece Mousehunt. Despite that last pirate movie, I like Gore's work.

Batman

1989 superhero movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: All of Gotham's criminals are talking about a mysterious crime fighter who dresses as a bat and can't be killed. Batman! One night, Batman throws one particular criminal in a giant pot of soup. He emerges disfigured and annoyed and decides to take out his frustrations on the people of Gotham.

I'm not sure I actually ever saw this movie all the way through. I was 16-ish, watching this in a theater with Krissy. There was fondling involved, lots of it as a matter of fact, and Krissy was a lot prettier than anything in the movie. And I'm including that scene where Jack Nicholson's over-the-top Joker is dancing purple-suited in an art musuem with his henchmen, one who has a boom box on his shoulder. There's not a movie critic alive (or in the case of Gene Siskel, dead) who doesn't realize giving a henchman a boom box is like pumping an action scene full of steroids, automatically increasing the level of bitchin' by 27%. Other than that, one of three scenes that date this movie with weird, out-of-place Prince (was he Prince in 1989 or was he a symbol?) funk tunes, there's not much going on in this overlong movie. For an action movie, it sure is boring. The action sequences are dull and often hard to see through this murkiness or, in several scenes, wryneck-inducing lightning strike editing makes it hard to figure out what's even going on. As with the most recent Batman movie, the performance of the guy playing the bad guy gives the film almost all of its energy. Nicholson's Jokering is off-kilter and deranged, although the script calls for far too much demented laughter and lame puns. Regardless of a thrilling score and piles of explosions, there's just something stiff about this whole thing. Of course, there was always something stiff when Krissy was around. Wacka-wacka-wacka!

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl

1919 depressing movie

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The yellow man loves Buddha, and after watching some visiting sailors engage in fisticuffs on the streets, he becomes further convinced to travel east and share that fat dude's teachings. He arrives in London, has no luck getting the message out (probably because he's yellow), and ends up running a shop that sells things nobody would want. One day, boxer's daughter Lucy wanders past. She's got a hard life because her father's abusive. The yellow man falls for her and gets a chance to get close to her later in the movie.

What a beautiful little movie this is. Silent drama doesn't always connect with me. A lot of times, they're boring, brutally boring. And although this suffers a bit from the limitations and tendencies of typical films from this period, there's a lot here that seems years ahead of its time. Aside from all the technical stuff and the interracial romance, this is the earliest movie I've seen that's leaned so far over into tragedy and has an ending like this. The performances range from hammy and unnatural (see: Donald Crisp as Lucy's daddy) to controlled and touching and haunting (see: Gish). In between would be the yellow man played by Richard Barthelmess, a white man. The story Griffith is telling here is nothing new. It's simple, poetic and emotionally walloping but simple. There are way too many title cards used to push the story, a lot of them, even though have a literary quality, completely unnecessary. This works best when Griffith tells the story and creates the moods with images alone. This just jumped over one or two other movies to become my favorite film of the nineteen-teens.

The Invisible Man

1933 science fiction

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A ambitious scientist with a bitchin' pair of sunglasses experiments with a twelve dollar chemistry set he bought at a discount store to find a way to reach his dream of being naked all the time without anybody being able to see how underdeveloped one of his nipples (the right one) is. He succeeds, but the concoction makes him batty, deluded, power-hungry, and surly. He figures out that not only can he now walk around naked, but he can probably steal bicycles and play practical jokes on people. And rule the world! Oh, snap! How can the authorities capture somebody they can't even see?

I wish this movie was a silent one. The main flaw is that overinflated early-30s acting that threatens to suffocate certain scenes. The landlady's screams might be the most obnoxious sound I've heard in a movie in a long time, and I don't really like Claude Rains' demented laughter that I guess is there to remind us that there's a dangerous invisible guy in the room. Despite that, this is great early sci-fi. My daughter Emma sat on the couch and watched some of this with me. At one point, she asked me how they were doing the invisible man special effects. That's part of the beauty of a movie like this. Nowadays, this movie would be made with computer effects. It could look a lot more realistic. Or, it could look choppy and glitchy. But there's just something pure about the effects used in this movie. They're pretty cool and must have been really cool in 1933, and they make you wonder how it was all pulled off almost eighty years ago. A bicycle riding by itself, books and cigarettes floating across the room, doors and windows opening by themselves, invisible asses indenting rocking chairs, men being tossed around. And the iconic image of the titular (there's that word again) character pulling the bandages off his face. Good stuff. I also like an opening panning shot of the innards of a tavern (complete with a guy playing darts at a 45 degree angle) and a montage of people locking their doors. This is a fun science fiction film, light on the horror as the invisible guy seems more like a jokester than a terrorist. One question though: Why would a criminal mastermind who is trying to elude the po-po tell everybody exactly when and where he's going to kill somebody? "I'll kill you. . .I'll kill you at 10:00 tomorrow night." My favorite scene: The invisible man's girlfriend Flora comes for a visit. He announces to his partner that he's going to get ready for her visit and leaves the room. When Flora shows up, there's only one thing different about him--those bitchin' sunglasses. For whatever reason, I thought that was hilarious.

The Man Who Would Be King

1975 adventure

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, two big-balled former British soldiers dicking around in India, decide to cross dangerous Afganistan (where the Taliban hide in caves) to reach Kafiristan, a heathen land where they plan on becoming kings. They teach villagers to use some guns they brought along, and after Daniel is struck with an arrow during battle but does not bleed, the Kafiritanians decide that he is the son of Alexander the Great.

God's holy trousers, what a fantastic film this is! Connery and Caine have great chemistry in what's essentially a buddy/road movie. The dialogue's fresh and witty and enriches the adventure yarn. This isn't exactly a comedy, but there are a lot of times where you get a whiff of a controlled Monty Python with the two leads like a mature Abbott and Costello type comedy team. The greatness with The Man Who Would Be King is that it spits in the eyes of tradition, genre-crossing like a She-Devil in plaid pants, unhinged and groovy and barely holding together with absurd poetics and half-assed histories. Snake charmers, dudes with insects on their faces, dope smokers, holy men, and filthy beggars line streets pre-credits, splashes of brown and more brown and crazy ethnic musics and an antsy camera helping them shiver on the screen. It paints an exotic picture right off the bat. John Huston found some nice places for this story to sit, and the shots of snow-covered mountains, desert battlefields, bottomless chasms, and towering temples help give it all a unique personality. And so many extras! There are very few times when the screen isn't stuffed corner to corner with stuff to look at. The Man Who Would Be King grabs your ears and eyes, tickles the pickle, mesmerizes. This is the type of movie you want to consume entirely, absorb. Costume design, a great score, cinematography. Yeah, you can chew and chew on this one. It's a lot of fun, but there's a poignancy just below the surface of the action and humor. Great stuff.

Note: Reportedly, this is Ass Masterson's second favorite movie. (Wikipedia)

Grizzly Man

2005 crazy person documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: For thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell had ventured into Alaska to hang out with grizzly bears and foxes. During his later trips, he even videotapes himself with the bears. Several times, he tells his camera that he would die for these bears, and then, as if to prove that he's not just all talk, he and his girlfriend Amy are devoured by a bear he nicknamed Grumpy.

On a technical level, putting all of Treadwell's footage and Herzog's interviews into something this cohesive and meaningful is quite the achievement. I really like how Herzog focuses on the smaller aspects of Treadwell's story. The Cliff Notes version of this is that Treadwell and his girlfriend were eaten by a bear and that it was really gruesome. But Herzog gives us a much more complete picture of this nutty guy. He's much more than just a victim of a bear attack. My favorite moments from the interviews and from Treadwell's footage are the ones that are almost insignificant to the actual story--details about him working in a restaurant, his parents holding his stuffed bear, Timothy discussing his sexuality, lingering shots of the Alaskan landscape. Treadwell's footage is both haunting and sad, haunting as we see some of his last moments on earth and hearing him earlier seem to predict his death, and sad as we get such intimate glimpses into the soul of this tortured and pretty unstable guy. There's definitely some weirdness in this documentary, so much that I can understand why a lot of people might be put off by the whole thing or even think the entire thing is an elaborate hoax. Herzog's narration is often goofy and far from objective. He unapologetically shifts from documentarian to commentator several times. A lot of the interviews seem rehearsed and unnatural, as does a "candid" moment when the coroner gives Timothy's friend the watch that was found on his arm. I have no doubt that there was some coaching involved and that Herzog is guilty of creating a great deal of this reality, but I'm not sure that matters much. You also get such a disturbing picture of Timothy in his films, from the faux-action stuff where he's running around like an adventure seeker to the times when he completely spazzes out and turns himself inside out so that his internal dialogue is on full display, that he doesn't seem like he could possible have been a real person. There's an absurdity to all of this, and Timothy Treadwell was an absolutely absurd human being, but you're not going to get a more chillingly complete picture of this sort of obsessive personality. It's easy to see some parallels between subject and director here. This is dense stuff. The horrors and beauties makes Grizzly Man the type of movie that will bounce around your noggin for a long, long time after you've shut it off.

Honkytonk Man

1982 tuberculosis public service announcement

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Red crashes onto his sister's dust-caked Oklahoma property, a Grand Ole Opry invitation in one hand and a bottle in the other. His 14-year-old nephew Whit looks up to him and is a much better driver, and his mother reluctantly allows him to accompany Red on his trip to Nashville. They misbehave along the way.

This movie's covered in a layer of dust, like all good Depression-era flicks should be. And it's filled with all sorts of dusty eccentrics, colorful character after colorful character. They're not entirely believable (neither is Clint's honkytonk man exactly), but they're entertaining enough, especially when they talk about panther piss, folks who've got money "ten miles up a mule's ass," and dogs shittin' peach pits. My favorite line's right at the beginning when Red tumbles out of the car he's just driven onto the Waggoneer farm and his sister drawls, "Is he dead?" This is one of those meandering, stream-of-conscious road movies, and it's also a pretty good buddy movie. The buddy is Eastwood's son, and their rapport naturally drives the picture. It's fun watching Eastwood and son steal chickens, rob poker players, drink, and visit whores. A subtitle for this could have been Honkytonk Men Gone Bad. There's an ease in the direction and writing that almost makes things look kind of lazy, and this is a story that's been done and done again and one that will undoubtedly be done again and again in the future (see: Crazy Heart). Like Bad Blake, I'm the songwriting and Eastwood's singing voice aren't totally convincing. The songs are OK and his voice is OK, but there's nothing that makes me think Red should have been a legend. This stands out most when Red, in the recording studio, becomes too sick to finish a song. Marty Robbins grabs the microphone and finishes for him, and completely blows him away. That's a nice moment actually. I did enjoy watching Clint tickle the ivories or pick his guitar though. Honkytonk Man's an example of a movie with a lot of good pieces, but sort of like the poster up there, it just doesn't seem complete.

Madman

1982 crazy guy with an ax movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Some old guy, a few counselors, and some campers at a summer camp share some scary stories around a campfire. The old guy tells the tale of Madman Marz, a crazed ax murderer who lives in that house right over there. This inspires one of the kids to start shouting his name. That's apparently a bad idea. You know how the rest of this goes.

If you're a young woman running from a Sasquatch with an ax and you decide to hide in a refrigerator, wouldn't it be easy for the Sasquatch to find you if you had emptied the contents of said refrigerator all over the kitchen floor before you crawled inside? Not in Madman. There's not a single original idea in this slasher. The killer isn't the least bit interesting, and neither are the victims. I do like that the madman apparently has an unseen sidekick who periodically noodles around with a portable synthesizer. This is a bad movie, but it's not the kind of bad that makes it worth watching. I really lost patience waiting for all of these kids to die.

Young Man with a Horn

1950 jazzman movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: "Horn" is, as you would probably expect, meant euphemistically. Young Man with a Horn is the story of pubescent Rick Martin's discovery of his "horn" and how a sage named Mr. Miyagi helps him learn how to wield it. He practices by himself over and over again, and then he uses it on both Doris Day and Lauren Bacall. Not bad, little Rick Martin! Not bad at all!

First off, look at that tagline at the top of the poster. "Put down your trumpet, Jazzman--I'm in the mood for love!" That's a good one. Young Man with a Horn is loosely based on the biography of jazzman Biz Biederbecke, but it's got a tidy little Hollywood ending. There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie. The performances are fine, the music is fine, the scenes in smoky nightclubs are really fine. But as a whole, this is so antiseptic, just so white bread. This movie needed a little zip or some zap or some pop. Or something. It's definitely a case where a movie loses steam as it goes on, especially since all it could build to was an ending that seemed like it was rewritten at the eleventh hour in order to please some studio execs. Kirk Douglas is really good, especially pulling off the virtuosic horn blower without being anywhere near a virtuosic horn blower, and the movie looks great. It just should have been a whole lot better.

The Man Who Came to Dinner

1942 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Acerbic radio personality Sheridan Whiteside agrees to dine at the home of the Stanleys, but after slipping on ice on their front steps and injuring his hip, he has to stay indefinitely. He demands outrageously, entertains an assortment of eccentric pals, has an octopus and penguins sent to him, and finds numerous other ways to disrupt the Stanley household. Meanwhile, his assistant Maggie has fallen in love with a local newspaper writer, and Sheridan feels threatened by the idea.

What a fun movie. Not only do I get to use my "inexplicable penguin" tag, but there's a character named Banjo, always a plus. Most of the fun emanates from the title man coming to dinner. I don't know who Monty Woolley is, but I loved his performance and this character, just the type of old man I'd like to be some day, only not as gregarious. He's witty and he's mean, saying things like "My great aunt ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102, and when she had been dead for three days, she looked better than you do now." This movie's a bit stagy and very scripty. There's nothing wrong with the performances; in fact, an unhinged Jimmy Durante as the aforementioned Banjo, the perpetually grinning Richard Travis, the egotistical Reginald Gardiner, society snob Ann Sheridan, et. al. bring this great enthusiasm to their roles. But it's all written to the point where it doesn't seem natural. Surely nobody ever talked like these people, right? However, when the script is this good, you really can ignore stuff like that. A lot of the humor is dated, to the point where a few references go over my head seventy years later, but the majority of this still works just great today. Insults, of course, are timeless. And I'm inspired by Whiteside to reintroduce the words "ducky" and "peachy" into my vocabulary.

The Birdman of Alcatraz

1962 bestiality epic

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Robert Stroud, our hero, is serving a life sentence at Leavenworth prison for killing somebody. While there, he has problems getting along with the guards and other cons, spends some time in solitary, and then kills a guard who was going to report him for getting too aggressive earlier. He's sentenced to die, but his mommy whines until he gets the sentence reduced to life in solitary. One day, he finds a new friend, an injured canary. This new buddy gets him interested in ornithology. He gets some more birds, builds some cages, gets Telly Savalas interested in ornithology, and becomes an expert in the field.

This is a heavily-fictionalized account of the real Robert Stroud. "Loosely-based" probably a strong enough, and I'm sure Stroud's family appreciates having their relative's history rewritten like this. But that's not my main problem with the film. My main problems are that it manages to be both too long and have a story that's undercooked. Things are also pretty flat, and it's just too much of a movie. I liked Burt Lancaster in this version of Stroud. The character's development isn't 100% believable, but Lancaster's able to go from violently apathetic to delicately nurturing in a believable way. I enjoyed seeing Savalas with some hair, and I also thought Karl Malden was good as the warden in this one. The film is weakened by Thelma Ritter's annoying performance as Stroud's mother. I also liked a lot of the shots of Lancaster's life in prison. The black and white photography's crisp, and at times I wished it was a little grittier. The birds, specifically the training involved in getting them to do what they do, really steal the show. All the scenes with the birds are wonderful, from the simple moment when Lancaster gets his bird friend to fly to his finger for the first time to the more complicated multi-fowl shots later on. An extended scene showing the birth of a bird (or maybe some sort of alien being) is also cool. This is hampered a bit with far too much narration (part of what makes it too movie-ish), but my favorite scene might be when the narrator briefly shifts to second person to describe life in solitary confinement.