First, however, I need to make clear that three dimensional images are not technically speaking three dimensional at all and therefore not actually very different from two dimensional images in most respects.  Both two and three dimensional images are projected in two dimensions, and both merely produce the illusion of three dimensions.  The difference between the two is only that supposedly three dimensional images produce the illusion of three dimensions much more convincingly than standard two dimensional images do.  Their difference is not so much in what they do as it is in how well they do it.  In terms of developing a language of three dimensional film, therefore, it is important to recognize that we are not describing the illusion of three dimensions as something essentially new or unique to three dimensional film.  Rather, we are describing the illusion of three dimensions as a preexisting space that a technological advance has merely enlarged to a degree that might allow films to produce meaning in new ways.

This recognition should only reinforce the more obvious ways in which the language of two and three dimensional films must be understood as deeply related.  After all, two dimensional films already use the illusion of depth as part of their film language, and three dimensional films cannot help but draw from the existing conventions of two dimensional film language for the two dimensions that still dominate three dimensional images.  This is why three dimensional film language is not now and can never be something distinct from two dimensional film language, but must always remain an extension of preexisting film language.  When we talk about three dimensional film language, therefore, we must always talk about it in this way, in relation to two dimensional film language.

With this understanding in mind, I would suggest that three dimensional film does in fact allow film to create meanings in new ways, that it does in fact expand the language of film, at least in potential.  Let me take up an example, not because it is the best of its kind, and not because it is necessarily very significant, but precisely because it is neither of these things and is the simple kind of moment for which  three dimensional film will regularly need to account.  The scene occurs in Michael Apted’s The Voyage of the Dawntreader, which is not a great movie for several reasons that I will not take up here, and it involves one of the main characters, Lucy, and a young girl whose mother has been captured by the evil mist that serves as the film’s antagonist.  Lucy and the young girl are going to sleep on the beach with the rest of the landing party, but the girl is lonely and worried about her mother, so Lucy tries to comfort her.  Though the two are lying several feet apart, they reach out to each other and hold hands through much of the scene, a gesture that in traditional film language would represent something like the bridging of the distance between them and of the loneliness that the two of them are feeling.

The scene is comprised of alternating shots from behind the heads of the two reclining characters, all standard over the shoulder conversation shots except that the actors are lying and except that the camera is tighter than normal behind the actors, to that the sense of perspective and foreshortening is accentuated.  This effect, which could certainly be accomplished in two dimensional film as well, is dramatically heightened in the three dimensional version, where the speaking actor’s head not only dominates much of the screen, and not only occludes in part the listening actor, but occupies a visibly dominant place with respect to the sense of depth that the illusion of three dimensions is creating.  The three dimensional film does not create an effect here that is impossible in two dimensions, but it makes this effect dominate the screen, makes it overshadow other elements of the film in ways that the two dimensional version would not. The sense of a relationship reaching across a distance of loneliness can be read into the two dimensional version of this scene as well, but it comes to dominate the three dimensional version of the film because the sense of depth and distance is emphasized so much by the enhanced illusion of three dimensions.

In other words, three dimensional film is able to foreground the meanings created by the illusion of depth to a degree that would be more difficult if not impossible in two dimensional film.  The meanings that are associated with depth and foreshortening and distance are now able to dominate other elements of the film’s language in ways that were not possible before.  The meanings themselves are not new, because two dimensional film already references a set of meanings associated with the illusion of depth.  However, these meaning that are produced through manipulating depth and distance are now much more powerful, and this shift, at least potentially, should change the way that directors weigh these kinds of shots in their films, but I do not think that many directors have yet come to account for these kinds of effects.

The scene from The Voyage of the Dawntreader is perhaps instructive here again.  Here is a case where the effect of the scene’s use of three dimensional film to enhance a sense of depth and distance seems out of proportion with the scene’s actual significance.  Though the three dimensional film language seems to draw attention very strongly to the relationship between Lucy and the young girl, this relationship does not actually play a very central role in the story, and the scene is not otherwise very significant except perhaps to show something of Lucy’s character.  Why, then, should the enhanced illusion of three dimensions be allowed to make the scene appear more significant than it is?  Perhaps the technique is merely being used to add interest to an otherwise static scene.  Perhaps it is simply being employed without much thought to how it might appear and how it might be read.  Whatever the reason, it is an example of a director failing to understand the full implications of the increased illusion of three dimensions that his medium now allows him.

This is why I think it is very important for directors and viewers and critics alike to take some time to think through the implications of three dimensional film on the use and interpretation of film language.  The technology is widely used, but it is not yet widely understood in an artistic sense, I think, and this work needs to be done before really great films can be made in three dimensions.

First, both stories centre around a small community that is terrorized by a monster who lives in the surrounding wilderness: Whoville by the Grinch and Heorot by Grendel.  This in itself is perhaps not very remarkable, not considering the vast number of other stories that are also structured in this way, and not considering the many historical and mythological and poetical reasons that make this plot structure narratively compelling.

Where the Grinch and Grendel are really similar, however, is in their reasons for attacking their nearby communities.  Neither are motivated be greed or revenge or instinct or even hunger.  Both are motivated solely by anger at the sounds of happiness that they hear in the communities from which they are excluded.  Grendel is enraged by the revelry in Heorot, and the Grinch is similarly unable to tolerate the singing down in Whoville.

The two monsters are not just angered because there are others who are perhaps happier than they are, nor just because there is happiness from which they have been excluded.  They are angered because the others who are happier than they are have had the temerity to make their happiness loudly and vocally public.  This is the crime for which the two communities are punished, the crime of proclaiming their happiness, and in this sense at least, these two very different stories are quite similar.

I am not sure what conclusions we might draw from this parallel, but it is exactly the sort of textual connection that I cannot resist marking, so I will simply mark it and leave the rest of you to make of it what you can.

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York – This is a difficult and elusive film in many ways, but I think that one of the keys to thinking through it is to take seriously the allusion that one of its characters makes to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, because I feel that both the film and the book orient themselves in a similar way in relation to reality and to the cultures in which they were created. They both employ a kind of mundane surrealism to explore the ways that our culture alienates us from ourselves, Kafka focusing on the influence of bureaucracy and legality and policing, and Kaufman focusing on the influence of our culture’s pervasive sense of isolation, neurosis, hypochondria, and self obsession. Even the endings are remarkably parallel, both heroes dying almost alone, accompanied only by virtual strangers, both still trying desperately, even until the end, to make sense of the lives that they have lived and the circumstances that have brought them to their deaths. The difference, I think, is that Kaufman’s hero dies naturally in the arms of a woman who cares about him, even if only very tangentially, a woman whose life he has even acted for a time, while Kafka’s hero is summarily executed by agents of an anonymous and uncaring judicial bureaucracy. There is a little hope in Kaufman, in other words, though it is a very little hope indeed.

David Shapiro’s Keep the River on Your Right – This film is as odd and as endearing and, well, as creepy as the man whose life it tells. Tobias Schneebaum is an intelligent and fascinating man, and his story is almost too strange to be true, but there is something about the way that he relates to the tribal peoples with whom he has lived over the years that seems to border on obsession or fetish, something that is not quite whole or balanced. The film is not less interesting for the reason, however, and it is well worth watching.

Hector Cruz Sandoval’s Kordavision – This film is about memory and retrospective and nostalgia. It is constantly recalling the earlier life of its protagonist, Korda, the famous photographer of the Cuban revolution, but even more, it is also constantly recalling the revolution itself, through the accounts of Korda and other photographers, through Sandoval’s contextual material, and through Castro himself. In doing so, it seeks to retell the revolution to an American audience in a way that might overturn longstanding misconceptions, and I think that it succeeds in this respect, at least to some extent, but its very success in telling Cuba’s past makes all the more obvious the uncertainty of Cuba’s present. Korda and his fellow photographers and even Castro himself are all so obviously playing the role of old men reminiscing about an earlier and a better time, so obviously living in a time that has long ago passed, and there is no sense that their roles are being taken on by those who are younger and more virile. The film’s effect, therefore, is truly nostalgic, a celebration of the past that can only ever figure the present in terms of loss.

Peter Mettler’s Petropolis – Because this film employs exclusively aerial shots and takes as its subject a massive ecological disaster, it is very reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, though without Herzog himself narrating chunks from the book Revelations in his ominous German accent. The film itself is primarily an aesthetic object rather than a film essay and provides only minimal information about the Alberta tar sands (though there is much more information in the extras), and I would say that the film suffers from some indecision in this question of whether to be aesthetic or informational. In my opinion, it needed either to be more fully aesthetic in its aims, as Lessons of Darkness is, leaving aside entirely the contextual subtitles at the beginning and the narrative voiceover at the end, or it needed to be more fully informative, fleshing out the subtitles and the voiceover to make them into useful context for the film rather than insufficient afterthoughts. In the end, however, the strength of the film is its cinematography, which is nothing short of amazing, and which will in itself certainly be worth any money that you might spend on a rental.

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon – I am still not sure that I have a real grasp on this film, though I have been talking about it with anyone who was willing for the better part of a week. The final crisis of the story is meant to be obscure, I think, and I can readily accept this, but I am not even certain of the reason for its obscurity, and I am also confused about the ambiguous but persistent links between the film’s primary story and the larger story of Germany entering into the First World War. That being said, the acting and the cinematography and the pacing are superb, and I would encourage you to see it, even if only for the chance that you might help me to understand it better.

Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate – This film is an adaption of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, which I reviewed only very recently. Polansky takes my recommendations and removes one of its two storylines, and he follows this storyline fairly closely for the first part of the film, deviating only very significantly in its latter stages. It is precisely in these latter stages that the film breaks down, however. The dynamic between the hero and the young woman who embodies the devil never achieves the complexity that it does in the book, and it falls apart almost entirely at the end of the film. Much of the film is like this. It fails to capture the tone that makes the book so enjoyable and then hurries to an unsatisfying end. I did not find much to enjoy in it.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander Revisited – This is the super-extended version of the film, which was supposed to have corrected the problems with the the only somewhat extended version, which was supposed to have clarified the original theatrical version.  I never did see the original or theatrical versions, so I am unable to say whether this third cut is an improvement over the first two, but I can say that, in its own right, it is not a very good film.  It has a grand vision and massive landscapes, I will admit, but it also has horrible pacing and a ridiculously convoluted narrative structure to go along with some pretty average acting and one of the worst accents, courtesy of Angelina Jolie, that you are ever likely to hear.  Some of the scenes are simply interminable, dragging on through endless conversation that does little to enrich the characters and almost nothing to forward the plot.  These dialogue scenes grow so tedious, I confess, that I watched much of the third and fourth hours of the film on fast forward, and I feel as though this may have improved my viewing experience considerably.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception – This is another of those films, like The Matrix or Dark City,  that is based on an interesting idea but lacks the script to be what it could have been.  The dream worlds in which Inception primarily takes place are logically inconsistent in several ways that directly affect the plot, so it is almost impossible to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the story of the film, and there is no substance to any of the secondary characters, so it is difficult to care much about their fate, and there is little to compensate for these faults.  The strongest parts of the film are those that explore the main character’s past relationship with his now deceased wife, a relationship that has become inseparable from the dream world.  These sections remind me a little of Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come, a film that I liked very much but that most people seemed to pan, and theses sections are the only places in the film where there is anything very compelling to the story.  Inception is perhaps worth seeing, but it is not nearly as complex or as innovative as many people make it out to be.  Despite what your friends may have said, you will not need to see it more than once “to really get it.”  Once will be more than enough, and only if you have not much else to do.

Robert Rodriguez’s Machete – I can only describe this film by saying that it is a Robert Rodriguez film.  Either you will know what this means or you will not.  His work is a little like Quentin Tarantino’s, only without the artistic pretensions: All the violence, but only a fraction of the thinking.  Let this example stand for the whole:  The lead character, whose name is Machete, finds himself trapped in a hospital.  He grabs a bone scraper from a tray of surgical instruments, disembowels one of his assailants, then uses the dying attacker’s intestines as a rope to swing through the window to the floor below.  I will leave you with this scene as the basis to make your own recommendation.

Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited -  I quite liked this film, though it would not rate it as highly as some of his others.  It has the same sense of being just slightly surreal, the same strange blend of humour and pathos, the same ironic tone, all of which I enjoy, but it lacks something that I cannot quite define, something that keeps me from being involved in its story as deeply as the stories of his other films.  It is certainly worth watching, particularly if you are a fan of Anderson’s other work, but I was expecting more from the film than it offered.

Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly – This is an interesting film in its way, but like many scripts that are based on books, it suffers in comparison to its source text.  It needs more time to develop the paranoia that the main character experiences as an anonymous narcotics officer assigned to surveil his own undercover persona, more time to explore the possibility that the drugs he is using are themselves producing a kind of paranoid self-surveillance, more time to examine the ways that this culture of self-surveillance, whether created by a drug induced paranoia or by a paranoia about the use of drugs, has now become a strangely essential part of our society.  More practically, it also needs to have someone other than the ever underwhelming Keanu Reeves starring in the lead role, but this should have gone without saying.

Okay, I start with the observation that the Star Trek franchise before 9/11 was the product and the reflection of a particular sort of  American utopian narrative, a narrative that understands the advance of science and technology and democracy and capitalism as a manifest destiny that will culminate in a world without poverty or hunger and where the threat of violence and disaster can always be met through technological intervention.   It is in this sense that Star Trek is a true science fiction.  The solutions to its problems are always technological and scientific in nature.  They are almost always a matter of reconfiguring the phaser banks, or modifying the warp core, or introducing a new modulation to the sensor array, or rerouting the signal through the secondary power relays.  These are the kinds of solutions to most problems in Star Trek, and these solutions produce a universe that is a coherent and continuing narrative, where the right people are always sitting in the Captain’s chair and making the decisions necessary to ensure the continuation of the Federation’s technological utopia, and it is this utopia that stands as the imagined future of the American way.

With the events of 9/11, however, America’s popular self-conceptions become questioned, and it ceases to be so self-evident that science, technology, democracy, capitalism, and the American way will achieve the future that this utopian narrative had imagined for itself.  The narrative of triumphal Americanism becomes seriously disrupted, and it now becomes necessary both to explain how this disruption could possibly occur and to determine how it might be overcome.

The newest Star Trek film, directed by , J. J. Abrams, responds directly to the challenges that 9/11 poses to the imagined future of technology, science, democracy, and capitalism.  Its story begins with a 9/11-like catastrophic event, a disruption to the very fabric of time and space that changes the course of history laid out in the original Star Trek timeline, replacing it with an alternative universe in which James T. Kirk does not in fact become captain of the Enterprise, but is replaced by the much more logical and analytical Spock.  The Star Trek universe, therefore, like the American nation, has suffered a tremendous shock that has disrupted its story as it was meant to be told.  The enemy has not just managed to threaten and to attack and to hurt.  It has managed to alter the course of events as they were supposed to have unfolded, an alteration that becomes symbolized by Spock’s replacement of Kirk in the captain’s chair.

The film positions the choice between Spock and Kirk as a choice between logical adherence to protocol and instinctual willingness to follow emotion.  A good leader, it suggests, is the one who knows when to throw aside the book, bend the rules, ignore protocol, and just get the bad guys, even when all logic and all odds would suggest another course of action.  As the story unfolds, Spock is represented to be a poor leader because he represses his grief and anger and desire for revenge beneath a logic and an adherence to protocol, whereas Kirk is represented to be a good leader because he embraces his emotions and decides to attack his enemies directly, even when it seems very likely that this course of action will lead everyone to their deaths.

If this is read as a response to the crisis of 9/11, the film affirms a need for leadership that values emotion and immediate revenge over logic and consultation.  It argues, essentially, that the disruption to the narrative of American technological utopia can be corrected as long as the right sorts of people find their way back into the captain’s chair, people who are willing to destroy their enemies at any cost.  Although the film purports to be a “reboot” of the franchise, therefore, I would suggest that its narrative is actually profoundly conservative in nature, advocating for a recovery, by any mean necessary, of the technological utopia that Star Trek has always represented in the popular American imagination.

It is Rocket who narrates the film, so from the beginning the very structure of the story places him behind the camera as well as in front of it, allows him a vantage point from beyond the the events of the film, behind the lens of the film in a sense, from which to offer the order of a narrative.  This sense of distance is reinforced by his narrative style, which seems to deliberate between many narrative possibilities, telling the audience that he must tell the story of this person before the story of another can be told, or returning to tell the same story but from a different perspective, all of which makes Rocket appear to be the agent of the film, located somewhere behind or beyond it, guiding and directing its images.  Even the cinematography reinforces this effect, freezing into photograph-like still shots when Rocket introduces the characters, so that he seems not only to determine the images that will appear, but also to freeze them, like a photographer, forcing the audience to rest on a single frame rather than to continue uninterrupted through the imagined space of the film.

All of this cinematic apparatus reinforces the way that Rocket’s character interacts with the rest of the people who make up the slum where he lives, the City of God, a place ruled largely by gangsters and hoodlums and financed largely by drugs.  Rocket remains always at a distance from this life, even when attempts to join it, and this distance is symbolized by his desire to be a photographer.  Even before he actually has a camera, he still seems able to put his life at a critical distance in a way that the other characters are not.  He is able to see his world through a lens for which the camera can only become a physical extension.

Even the other characters recognize that Rocket is different in this respect.  When Little Ze, one of the gang leaders, is offered a camera in exchange for some drugs, he is about to refuse until he is reminded of Rocket’s love of photography, and he takes the camera as a gift for Rocket.  Though Little Ze has no use for the camera himself, he recognizes that Rocket is able to use it in a way that he himself is not. Similarly, in a later scene, another drug lord wants pictures taken of his gang, but no one is able to work the camera, so he has Rocket come and take the pictures.  Rocket has a knowledge of the camera that no one else has, just as he has a use for the camera that no one else has, the implication being, perhaps, that the others who live in the City of God do have some access to the critical distance represented by the camera but lack the ability or the knowledge to use it.

Eventually, it is Rocket’s camera that enables him to escape the City of God, as his pictures of the gang war are picked up accidentally by a newspaper, and he is then given the opportunity to be a photo-journalist, an opportunity on which he makes good.  There are obvious practical reasons for this, of course, since his skills with a camera give him an advantage over many of the other characters who are skilled and trained only in poverty and violence.  Even so, Rocket escapes the City of God as much because of what the camera represents as because of what it means as a practical skill.  He survives because he is able to maintain a critical distance, a critical lens, between his life and himself.  He is able to step back from the poverty and the violence enough to make meaning of it, to frame it in a picture, to narrate it in a story, and it is this ability that actually saves him.

It is my intuition that there is a real truth in this, a real truth in the idea that an ability to look at one’s own life with a certain critical distance, with a critical distance not separable from an artistic and narrative and meaning-making impulse, is crucial to surviving the evils of one’s world, whether that world be a Brazilian slum or a Canadian suburb.  This critical distance will not guarantee a more accurate perspective on one’s world, of course, because it is always an act of creation and narration.  Neither will it guarantee an easier or better life in one’s world, because it is always an act of resistance and critique.  It will, however, I believe, I hope, as such things can be judged, offer the possibility of surviving what is evil in one’s world, and such survival is worth whatever cost it might entail.

John Hillcoat’s The Road – I watched The Road on Father’s Day, and it was a powerful film experience for me.  I had already been thinking about what it means to be a father and to be a son, so perhaps this deepened the emotion that the film produced in me, but I think I would have found it impactful even apart from this added dimension. Though I do have some reservations about the plot, especially with the assumption that hunger and lack of social structure would suddenly cause mass numbers of people to overcome millennia of taboo and become ravening cannibals, the film is tightly structured and well acted, and it achieves a very satisfying and coherent aesthetic vision.  Rather than posing the question of how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, it poses the much more considerable question of how to raise children to be moral human beings in a world that no longer has a standard of morality.  It is not so much about the survival of humanity as it is about the survival of what makes humanity human.  I recommend it very highly.

Mabrouk El Mechri’s JCVD – I confess that I am not really a fan of martial arts movies.  While I am not immune to the coolness factor in watching some of the stunts, I usually like a plot and some characters to go with this sort of thing, which means that my exposure to Jean-Claude Van Damme has been limited and mostly forgettable.  JCVD, however, is another sort of film altogether, and while I would stop well short of calling it great cinema, it explores in a thoughtful way the relation between the film star as person and as actor, and it does so with a nice balance between humour and poignancy.   The central scene in the film is indicative of the whole in this respect.  It begins with Van Damme being lifted mysteriously into the rafters of the building where he is a hostage.  He then addresses the camera and the viewer directly with a kind of confession, beginning with the claim that the movie is for him, and ending with him saying, “I truly believe it’s not a movie.  It’s real life.”  The moment is surreal.  No explanation is offered for it.  Yet it stands as a remarkably moving and original scene, and it alone is reason enough to see the film.

Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert – The wit and irony of this surrealist attack on the Catholic church in particular and on organized religion in general make it a most entertaining film, and it is well short of an hour in length, so it feels like the visual equivalent of a short-story: brief, structured, and pointed.  It is abruptly cut at times, but is otherwise a very nice bit of filmmaking and is sure to spark a conversation among those who see it with you.

Alex Proyas’ Dark City – There is much about this film that I liked very much.  I only wish that it had been able to avoid alien intervention in order to make its plot work.  It needed its villains to remain mysterious and unexplained.  It needed them to remain more metaphor than reality.  It needed there to be no way out of the city.  It needed there to be no Shell Beach.  It needed, in short, to have the intellectual courage really to explore the possibility that our lives are constructed more by external forces than by our own will and free choice.  It is an entertaining film in many respects, but it is much less than it could have been.

Fernando Meirelles’ City of God – This is a truly remarkable film.  Its subject is engaging.  Its acting is strong.  Its story is seamless.  Its cinematography is inventive.  To me eye at least, the film has no flaws.  It is what a film should be.

Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog -  I will need to direct my remarks about this film to two different sorts of viewers.  To most people I would suggest that the brutality and the grotesqueness and the purposeless of the violence of the film will make the it almost unwatchable, and recommend that they give it a very wide berth.  Even the cover picture will likely offend them.  On the other hand, to the sort of people who are willing to approach this violence with the irony and the detachment in which it is directed, there is no film quite like it.  If you think you are one of the second sort, do watch it, but you have been fairly warned.

Albert and Allen Hughes’  The Book of Eli -  I gave this film a chance, despite the trailer and despite the word of mouth reviews, but I should have known better.  The few action scenes do not distract sufficiently from the bland plot, the indifferent acting, and the unendurable dialogue.  The ending, which promised all along to be painfully sentimental, was made even worse by also falling into the kind of cloying, self-congratulatory, vaguely nationalistic religiosity of which only Americans seem to be capable.  There is very little about this film that justifies the time it takes to watch it.

Avatar by James Cameron (2009) – The best thing that I can say about this script is that it remains mostly inconspicuous.  If I was to say more, I would be forced to call the plot cliche and the story racially stereotypical and the character development both shallow and predictable.  The acting is generally of a similar caliber:  good enough not to distract but otherwise uninspired and uninspiring, even from some of the more established names from whom something more might have been expected.

Even so,  despite all of these criticisms, I would not hesitate to list Avatar among the most impressive film experiences of my life.  Too much has been written already about the 3D and the special effects and the visual scope of the film, so I will not go over these things again, but the greatest testament to the power of these elements is probably the fact that they are able to make a mediocre script and barely passable acting into the highest grossing film of all time.

Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954) – This was my second Kurosawa film, but it may as well have been my first, since I saw Yojimbo so long ago that it is only a very hazy memory for me now.  I will not make the vain attempt to describe the film or the director for those who are unfamiliar with them, but I do want to discuss two scenes that I liked particularly.  They both centre around a peasant girl and the youngest of the seven samurai who have have been hired by her village to protect it from bandits.  The two fall in love, as might be expected, but they are separated both by class and by the ambiguous relationship that the peasants have with the samurai, both relying on their strength to maintain the social order and also fearing that their strength might be used to undermined that social order, to take the peasants’ food and daughters by force.

In one scene, the two lovers are sitting in a meadow of flowers, a place that has already been visually associated with the young samurai.  The peasant girl basically offers herself to the samurai, but he hesitates, and she becomes angry, questioning his manhood and his status as a samurai.  During this scene, there is a shot of the two lovers sitting, turned toward each other, face to face, and the camera pans behind the samurai, so that the girl’s face is increasingly occluded and eventually eclipsed by his head. It is as if the girl’s beauty is being obscured by the many questions that the samurai has to consider or as if the girl herself is being eclipsed by her lover.

In a later scene, the two face each other once again, but now across a huge bonfire in the village square.  The girl is  at the door of a hut, and her invitation is clear to the samurai, but he hesitates again, and the camera alternates between their two gazes as they look at each other across the fire, the symbol both of their passion but also of the considerations that separate them.  The scene culminates with the samurai crossing to the other side of the fire to consummate their perhaps ill considered love.

These two sequences are fabulous.  They are so tightly blocked and filmed, so symbolically suggestive on various levels, that they almost stand as stories unto themselves.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog  (2009) – If I was forced to describe this film in a single sentence, I would say that it is a colossal practical joke being played by the director and the principal actor on the audience and the rest of the cast.  It is as though Herzog took the script of a completely conventional cop film and told most of the cast to take it ever so seriously.  Then, letting only Nicholas Cage and maybe Val Kilmer in on his intentions, he set about shooting the film as a systematic mockery of both the Hollywood cop flick and the culture that produces it.  There are three highlights for me.

First, there is the scene where Nicholas Cage, high on cocaine, enters the apartment where his team is staking out a suspect.  He sees two lizards on the table and asks why they are there.  Of course, nobody else sees the lizards, so Cage turns and looks out the window for what seems like two minutes, all the while, in the foreground, the two lizards are climbing over each other.  The scene closes with Cage, at long last, turning back to glance at the lizards once again.

Second, there is the scene where a car has crashed after hitting an alligator.  The shot that closes the scene is filmed from the perspective of another alligator and looks very much like handicam footage.  The shot lasts for perhaps a minute, and there are some indications that the alligator is being prodded with a stick so that it will move.

Third, there is the scene where one set of gangsters is gunned down by another.  Cage, high once again, tells a gunman to shoot one of the corpses again.  “Why?” the gunman asks.  “Because his soul’s still dancing,” Cage replies, and the camera shows the corpse’s doppelganger breakdancing in the middle of the floor until the body is indeed shot again and the soul drops awkwardly to the floor.

This film is a must see, I think, but only if you are prepared to watch it from the same ironic perspective that it was directed.

Watchmen by Zack Snyder (2009) – I did not love this film.  I did not even like it as much as the graphic novel, which I liked less than many others told me I would.  The narrative of the pirates, which is my favourite part of the book, is cut entirely from the film, though there are for obvious filmic reasons for this.  The music, which seems appropriate where it is mentioned in the book, seems often jarring and awkward when it is actually played in the film.  The narrative, which is pleasantly complex in the book, appears only hurried and shallow in the film.  I am thankful, in short, that I paid nothing to see it.

Sanjuro by Akira Kurosawa (1962) – This film is a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo, and it might be summarized by the phrase, repeated several times in the course of the story, that the best sword remains sheathed.  The hero, a grizzled samurai, is told this first by the noblewoman whom he rescues near the beginning of the film, and he repeats the phrase to himself in the final scene, but much of the film reinforces this idea less obviously, showing how most violence is unnecessary, and how it is the stupidity of some that makes violence necessary for others.

The final scene recapitulates this theme succinctly.  Sanjuro is confronted by a samurai whom he has tricked and defeated throughout the course of the film.  Sanjuru has removed his hands from his sleaves and has tucked them against his body under his kimono, and though I am not certain whether there are the cultural connotations for this stance, it is certainly a passive one, with his hands far from his sword and encumbered by his clothing.  He remains in this position even once confronted, telling his opponent that he does not want to fight, that enough blood has been spilled already.  He is, visually and symbolically, sheathed, but his opponent is persistent, as movie villains so often are, and he is forced to unsheathe himself and slay his enemy.  He is, as he says himself a moment later, a sword that cannot remain sheathed.

This blend of symbolism and reflection with what remains essentially an action film, all very beautifully shot, is what makes Kurosawa’s films so appealing.

49th Parallel by Michael Powell (1941) – As a Canadian, I find 49th Parallel often amusing, since it portrays Canada as a nation of trappers and natives and Hutterites and dillettant democrats, which most Canadians would have recognized only as a stereotype even at the time the film was made.  The propgandist elements of the film are also enetrtaining at a remove of some seventy years, sounding mostly forced and mostly unnatural.  The story, however, still remains compelling, and the pacing is superb, creating a thriller that builds in intensity without having to resort to cliche plot techniques.  The score, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is also very good.  I would recommned it very highly for a February evening with a glass of scotch.

On January 4th, several days before the screening, I received an email from the Washington legal firm of Patton Boggs, which is representing the Vicini family.  The email expressed dismay at my decision to show the film and included a forty-five page copy of the legal injunction that the firm has submitted to the courts, outlining the various respects in which the Vicini family feels that the film has misrepresented them and their interests.

On January 9th, I showed the film anyway.

Today, on January 14th, I am now posting the email that was sent to me by Patton Boggs along with the message that I do not intend to be bullied, now or ever, about the films that I decide to screen in the privacy of my own home, and let us be clear: the act of sending forty-odd pages of legal injunction is nothing more than mere bullying.

It has no legal function, since a defamation suit against the filmmaker has no bearing whatsoever on my right to watch the film in my own home.

Neither does it serve to correct misinformation.  Forty-odd pages of legal injunction will never be read by anyone, and any real intent to be corrective would have been much better served by a two or three page summary of the Vicinis’ objections.

It certainly does not provide proof of anything.  That the Vicinis object to their portrayal in the film and have filed a defamation suit proves absolutely nothing, in either direction, and even should the judge rule in their favour, I would still have some reservations about the ability of The District Court of Massachusetts to arrive at an informed judgment on a case whose material evidence lies mostly in a foreign state under the control of one of the interested parties.

The only thing that sending this legal document does  is attempt to intimidate people out of watching and showing and addressing the film for themselves.  The only thing it does is try to convince people that they should censure themselves at the discretion of those with the money to retain large legal firms that will send impressive looking swathes of legal material to anyone who shows up on a google alert.

I will not be so intimidated, and neither should you.  Inform yourself of both perspectives on the question, by all means.  Just do not let yourself be intimidated into letting the question drop.  In fact, I suggest that you go and rent the film this weekend, or even better, you can always borrow it from me.

For those who are interested in further persepctives on this dispute, there have been some interesting articles posted by  The World Socialist Web Site, by The Boston Globe, and by the National Catholic Reporter.