The earliest love poem to cinema’s power that I’ve seen, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. follows a clumsy projectionist (Keaton) with dreams of becoming a famous gumshoe through reality and fantasy alike. In the real world, our tragic hero is, shall we say, a bit of a sad sack. He’s broke, unlucky (for instance, he scrounges up a few bucks that were mistakenly tossed in the theater’s trash, but misses a thick wallet full of bills), and carries around a copy of “How to be a Detective” despite having no instincts or talents whatsoever. His rival for the always-prevalent girl—known only as The Villain—is smoother, better dressed, and one step ahead of him in the tricks department, even framing Keaton’s out-of-luck protagonist for stealing a pocketwatch. Beaten down and at a loss, he returns to his day job in the projectionist booth, dozes off…and voila! The cinema opens up new worlds! Transformed in his dream, the new-and-improved, dashing Keaton outsmarts the entire town, eats his nemesis for breakfast (not literally, of course), and winds up the victor in all senses, be it a battle of the minds or getting the girl. Though I’ve never found Keaton as funny as Chaplin, his physical gifts and gymnast-like moves are something to see, and with Sherlock Jr., he gives us a terrific prelude to what directors like Godard and Bogdanovich would do much, much later with their camera’s and cinematic passions. That the director and lead are the same man here adds a wonderful wrinkle to the proceedings. This is definitely my favorite Keaton, and should be required viewing for film students and lovers everywhere.

75/100

For someone whose knowledge of the electric, and tragically brief, career of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is sorely lacking, Tamra Davis’ The Radiant Child serves as a poignant encapsulation of Basquiat’s life, work, and the 1980’s New York City that was his playground and, ultimately, his poison. In other words, The Radiant Child possesses plenty of educational value, and that’s valid for those who have a cursory (or even more) understanding of Basquiat’s story going into the film as well. But what really sets this superb documentary apart is its filmic vibrance: it practically pulsates with a captivating energy that’s lacking in the genre all too frequently. Myriad slideshows of Basquiat’s astonishingly captivating paintings grace the screen frequently, keeping his one-of-a-kind talent in the spotlight. Interviews with other artists (including Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat back in 1996), ex-girlfriends/lovers, and promoters are plentiful, but never overwhelm the proper focal point of  Basquiat as a man and artist. Music of some kind hums for nearly all of The Radiant Child, providing an appropriate soundtrack for Basquiat’s extraordinary gifts. His quirky relationship with Andy Warhol is fascinating to see onscreen. And yet, for all of the amazing art, shady streets, doubters, lovers, and passions in The Radiant Child, it’s strongest moments of all appear in the form of an exceedingly rare interview that Davis—a personal friend of Basquiat’s—filmed years ago that reveal a shy, scared genius who, like so many of the world’s greatest minds, has a painfully difficult time expressing himself and communicating outside the comfort zone that his art provides. During the interview, which is expertly edited and slowly unveiled throughout the movie as a touching sidebar Basquiat’s external persona, we see Basquiat respond to questions with a nervous, though boyishly beautiful, smile. He has trouble holding eye contact, and his sentences trail off, as if verbal expression is legitimately painful (though his paintings are full of words; they play a major role in his visual pizazz). It’s heartbreaking to watch, as the interspersing of Basquiat’s child-like vulnerabilities with his other-worldly talents make his ultimate demise all the more excruciating, and leave the viewer wondering what could have been. I knew little about Basquiat’s life before watching The Radiant Child, but I sure won’t forget what I know now anytime soon.

78/100

Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express resembles the Thin Man films in tone, but it’s longer-winded and its primary protagonist lacks the charm of Nick Charles—oh, Albert Finney tries gamely as eclectic detective Hercule Poirot, but he’s just too cartoony to take seriously. While Lumet clearly aimed for a stylized approach to this whodunit, he never really seems comfortable using it: the movie opens with a brooding series of vignettes regarding a long-ago murder, which feels appropriately dark for Lumet’s cinematic sensibilities, but quickly veers towards Clue territory. The result is a movie that’s entertaining enough—even charming at times—but frequently feels awkward and, despite a big-name cast of titans (Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Ingrid Bergman, etc), is surprisingly clunkily acted. Only Perkins—and, to a lesser extent, Bergman—really shines, and even he’s mostly just reprising his mother-obsessed Norman Bates of Psycho, if not quite as grotesquely here. The  final reveal—the classic “gather everyone together in one room and gradually break down the clues until the villain winds up with an accusatory finger in his mug”—is about 15 minutes too long (though it’s ultimately somewhat satisfying). Light enough to pass for acceptable entertainment, but lacking in enough moxie or punch to rise above mediocrity.

53/100

Let’s just say that Zhang Yimou’s remake of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) doesn’t exactly strike the tone I would have selected for the topic matter, and film, in question. Re-imagining Blood Simple in Eastern terms, A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop takes place in a barren, to put it kindly, desert town in China, not far from the Great Wall, where the miserly, crabby old scrooge Wang (Ni Dahong) owns a noodle shop—if the old adage about business success being all about location is true, then how Wang became exceedingly wealthy eludes me—and lives with his far younger wife, played by Yan Ni (and oddly nameless).When he discovers that his unhappy-and-feisty wife is having an affair with his employee, the weak-willed—except when he’s tossing dough; you’ll see—Li (Xiao Shenyang), Wang hires the stone-faced policeman Zhang (Sun Hunglei) to murder the pair. But the plot thickens when Zhang’s greed gets the best of him, and mass killing, double-crossings, and multiple revenges of different levels ensue.

Like in Hero (2003) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), Yimou fills the screen with rich colors and vibrant images, like sweeping sand dunes and fiery sunsets. The problem is that what makes Blood Simple (which, in fairness, I haven’t seen in full in some time) so gripping is the smoky, nightmarish atmosphere that the Coens created. Here, Yimou’s overdone compositions lend a cartoonish quality to the proceedings that sap it of most of its punch. The first 30 minutes are particularly awful, as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop’s attempts to mix mystery with farce fall flat on its face. Blood Simple is full of tension, dry wit, and great acting…but Dahong isn’t Dan Hedaya, and in fact, only the graceful Hunglei turns in a truly strong performance here, with Shenyang eking out a passing grade. The remainder of the cast ranges from lame to irritating to flat-out bad. Obviously, this cinematic form was a conscious choice by the filmmaker, but I can’t help but feel that a Japanese director like Miike or Kitano could have done something much more interesting with the story (those who liked Chen Kaige’s The Promise, which I found unbearable, might really enjoy this one).

In its defense, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop gets a good bit more palatable after the aforementioned woeful beginning: once the first murder occurs, multiple long, extended wordless sequences frequently replace much of the unwelcome glitz, and the film settles into a moderately enjoyable flow, though it never comes close to living up to its potential, even though many scenes are taken almost exactly from the source material (though as we’ve seen in Gus Van Sant’s dreadful remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, that’s anything but an automatic recipe for success). It feels to me like Yimou has lost much of his knack for nuance over the past 15 years—among his filmography, only Raise the Red Lantern (1991) contains much subtlety, and doesn’t use overcharged visuals to get much of its point across. He’s talented enough to keep most of his work from careening completely off the tracks—I’ve enjoyed most on some level or another—but this is the closest he’s come to a true failure. The final hour is adequate enough to prevent A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop from claiming that unfortunate title, but it’s not enough to salvage the movie into something I’d recommend to anyone but the most fervent fans of Yimou or the genre.

41/100

Though it occasionally pushes its patriotism motif too far (see: protagonist John Sims being born on the 4th of July, for starters) and would never pass for a subtle picture, King Vidor’s The Crowd is extremely successful in all other ways, particularly in its strong portrayal of a full circle self-realization, love story, and sweeping portrait of America. The Crowd was filmed a few years before the Great Depression, but nevertheless has a distinct feeling of foreboding, with its broken dreams and endless uphill climbs. It tells the story of Sims (James Murray), a small-town boy who moves to the bright lights of New York in search of the great American Dream. Vidor establishes the contrasts of Sims’ roots with the Big Apple’s overwhelming throngs, using a downward shot of John cautiously coming up the stairs just after his father has died—indicative of the strong likelihood that, despite his high hopes, John will remain small—and an upward-facing shot of the skyscrapers a few moments later as thousands of pedestrians briskly stride by, confirming how easy it is to get lost in the shuffle. Further evidence of what will become The Crowd’s overarching theme abounds. John dreamily stares at hit-it-big contest advertisements for motor fuel, wishing for a way to avoid being a nobody forever. His office, a sprawling floor of identical desks and men in suits, is the epitome of mundane: this is drilled in when, after a typically slavish day, four co-workers pass John in the company washroom and ask if he’s “scrubbing up” in four slightly different variations in the span of about 45 seconds. This somber scene symbolizes the life that John dreads for himself: the same people, doing the same banal things, day after day after day.

Once settled into his mundane city routine, John eventually meets Mary (Eleanor Boardman) on a double blind-date with ambitious co-worker Bert (Bert Roach), and quickly proposes and takes her for his wife. It turns out, however, that married life doesn’t cure his ills: in fact, it enhances them in many ways. As he stagnates at work, his long-promised raise always “delayed,” Mary’s family begins turning on him, and tension starts to build at home. They almost separate, but Mary becomes pregnant, which gives John a jolt of motivation and spark to stay. But alas, it’s merely a temporary reprieve. For every seemingly positive step forward—John actually winning a slogan contest; an $8 raise at work—there’s two steps back. Then tragedy strikes, and The Crowd throws everything that’s happened so far into a darker, sadder context. Reminders of John’s limited impact on the world run rampant, such as a policeman telling him that the world can’t stop because of the tragedy. When the quote, “The crowd laughs with you always, but will cry with you only for a day” flashes across the screen, it feels startlingly appropriate, and Vidor’s depiction of the heartbreaking occurrence and its subsequent impact on John and Mary is really very sad to see. John begins to blame everyone around him for his woes, quitting his job and bouncing around new ones until even Mary, who’s been a rock throughout the turmoil, begins to snap. John’s refusal to accept a reluctant job offer from Mary’s brothers is the last straw in her tolerance: it becomes as evident to her as to us, the viewers, that John is, was, and always has been all talk and no action.

As a shattered John staggers towards a town bridge in a daze, prepared to end it all, it’s difficult not to commiserate with his misery, thanks to Vidor’s excellent script and direction (though the aforementioned lack of subtlety occasionally makes the proceedings feel unnecessarily excessive—it’s hard to find a five-minute stretch without some reference to America’s place as the land of opportunity and heartbreak). While it’s easy to dismiss John’s tragic arc as self-made, it’s just as easy to view is as nothing more or less than human nature working its wonders (or lack thereof). When John—inspired to live one final time by a last-second appearance from his son—swallows a pride and takes a job as a walking advertisement for a store, it conjures up an earlier sequence when Bert, during the double date where John met Mary, sees someone dressed in identical garb, and quips: “I bet his dad thought he’d be president.” The evolution of John’s character can be neatly summed up by these two bookend scenes: it’s no longer about bravado and an ultimately meaningless sense of pride, but about the bottom line—supporting his family, and making sure he doesn’t lose Mary forever. Being lost in the crowd may not be anyone’s dream, but it’s also not the end of the world.

73/100

An odd duck to be sure, Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen is substantially darker than the other Capra films I’ve seen, with a Chinese civil war, gunfire aplenty, and firing squads serving as the backdrop for a love story that never really comes together. There’s plenty to admire here: Capra utilizes fade-ins very creatively to mark the passage of short bursts of time, and Barbara Stanwyck is excellent as Megan Davis, a missionary who travels to Shanghai to visit an orphanage—and to marry her fiancé, fellow humanitarian Robert Strike—and gets thrust in the middle of chaos, which leads to her imprisonment in the vast palace of Sanshô the Bailiff-esque warlord General Yen (Nils Asther). The clashing of cultures and ways of life is interestingly portrayed, and our current differences of opinion with China about what’s right indicates that not much has changed. But as the story evolves, it becomes increasingly difficult to swallow Megan’s conflicted emotions towards the cruel, if coldly dignified, General Yen: sure, she might be happy that he heeds her advice to spare the treacherous Mah-Li (Toshia Mori)—and ashamed that her instincts turned out to be incorrect in this instance—but it’s impossible to believe that an engaged, seemingly-in-love American bleeding-heart could develop genuine emotions for a diabolical character such as General Yen (even his eyebrows and mustache scream Devil). That the entire thing takes place in less than a week makes the entire affair more ridiculous: I know that’s fairly standard for the era, and can hold up in some cases, but the sheer extremity of the circumstances here severely hamstrings The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Still, while it’s no It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s pretty cool to see Capra attempt to tackle such a somber setting, and he manages to produce a decent, if severely flawed, film from it.

55/100

Physical humor and tomfoolery abound in this romp through the first week of married bliss and pitfalls, but there’s also something really sweet about the love between Keaton and his new bride here (they share a kiss every two minutes, or at least it feels that frequent). The stunts are pretty awesome, especially an opening act involving the straddling of two cars, and watching Keaton attempt to *put together* his home—way to go, Uncle Mike: now that’s a generous wedding gift!—is a hoot, especially as a rejected beau mischievously switches labels, causing the house to look like a reflection in a carnival mirror once it’s assembled. There’s also some fun experimenting with cinema as a medium—a hand blocks the camera as the naked wife emerges from the bathtub; a panicked Keaton spirals through the spinning house during a storm in a long tracking shot. And the final scene, which finds the lovebirds in search of a new home but just as smitten with one another, is terrific. Add on the obligatory Keaton dramatic scene moment, and you have my current favorite of his films (though I owe The General a revisit), a fine combination of humor and heart.

73/100

Early short that showcases Chaplin on a power trip as a tramp-turned-cop who takes down the slums’ (Easy Street) biggest bully (a beast of a man who’s impervious to batons and boasts devil-like eyebrows). The slapstick is plentiful, similar to 1921’s The Kid—though it’s nowhere near as funny as that one—and of course, there’s the obligatory damsel in distress. It’s really about image, and how a strong one, even if obtained by luck, can breed self-confidence and, subsequently, social clout. There’s also some religious allegory at work: Easy Street opens in a church, where Chaplin humorously plays with a baby but, more seriously, finds his way after leaving and noticing a “help wanted” sign on the local police station’s door. Though Easy Street is more charming than laugh-out-loud funny, seeing policeman Chaplin doff his cap to the twice-vanquished bully on a cleaned-up Easy Street at the end is worth the price of admission, and it’s a great warm-up act for his truly great work of the next two decades, particularly The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931), but also The Gold Rush (1925) and Modern Times (1936), as well as the aforementioned & underrated The Kid.

63/100

Went to Borgata last weekend, and had a very successful 2.5 days of LHE (2.5 because one was a very short session; I tried my hand at the $215 turbo tournament, and went out despite some strong play and reads), winning ~4K at 20-40 and 40-80. It’s a reminder that 1) this is one of my greatest talents, and 2) I don’t play nearly enough. With my first child (a boy, Julian) on the way, that’s got to change: I have his financial future to think about, and I need to maximize my time spent. Sleep has to be sacrificed! This also means I really need to get to work on my online game, which has always drastically lagged behind my live performance. Before depositing money into PokerStars, though, I’m going to really gameplan, ranging from game selection to ambience, so I can be as ready to rock & roll as possible.

An offbeat, tonal take on the Western, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is best described as soulful and creative, if occasionally scattered and overambitious. Set in rural Texas on the Mexico border, Burials takes on particular moral weight when viewed today (June 2010) in light of the controversial immigration law that Arizona passed a few months back. Jones’ film focuses on Pete Perkins (Jones), a weathered old rancher who forms a peculiar bond with Melquiades Estrada, a Mexican cowboy seeking work. When Estrada is accidentally shot and killed by trigger-happy border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), an enraged Perkins seeks out the murderer and forces him to accompany him on a journey into Mexico to return Estrada’s body to his family, fulfilling a promise he’d made to his friend some time back. Burials serves as a warning towards those thinking that Arizona’s new policy can be implemented seamlessly and without innocent casualties:  give an uneducated grunt a sniper rifle, and this is what you get. On a wider scope, Jones does an excellent job of portraying each character as severely flawed and without meaning, a perfect embodiment of the terrain they inhabit. There’s Norton’s wife Lou Ann (January Jones), a perky pigtailed blond who quickly grows bored with her husband scouring the fields all day, and without any entertainment beyond the mall, quickly realizes the severe limitations of the man she chose and life she’s leading. There’s waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo), who fucks half the town—she’s in her mid-late 40’s, by the way—despite (because of?) being married: her evident distaste for her boxed-in life conjures up Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. And in addition to the shooting of Estrada, Mike Norton flashes his anger at the world and self-disgust by beating up a few petrified, unarmed immigrants who entered the country, including punching a young lady in the face (a healer, she would later have her revenge, though she first displays a compassion not present in the Texas community). Even a blind hermit who Norton and Perkins meet on their trek fits the bill, begging for them to take his life and put him out of his misery.

Jones deserves some serious props for casting Pepper as Norton: after seeing him brilliantly chomp the scenery as slimy investment banker Frank Slaughtery in Spike Lee’s masterpiece 25th Hour, I could never have pictured him as a trailer-trash Westerner, but he disappears into the role. The cinematography and mood are excellent. Where Burials falters a bit is in its editing: the ambitious flashback-and-forth techniques take away from the film’s cohesion, and it could probably have been tauter if 15 minutes had been shaved. And the ending, while interesting intellectually, lost me emotionally—I was definitely into the Estrada-as-a-martyr direction, and a surprising twist works on some levels, but really took me out of the movie’s rhythm. Still, parts of Burials are quite touching, and the work as a whole is definitely sophisticated: Jones imbues his characters with depth, and they work together on a harmonious level, even when they don’t share the screen. As an actor, Jones doesn’t really stray from his comfort zone, but he gets the job done nicely, and the rest of the supporting cast is stellar. Ultimately, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a nice little film, overlooked by many but blessed with plenty of good traits and a few warts. The strengths are strong enough to easily warrant finding time to check it out.

67/100