A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (1951)

This movie's become such a touchstone, I think many people, myself included, assume they've seen it even if they haven't. If I have seen this before, it was prior to my taking up residence in the South, and also, in some respects, prior to my ascension/descension to adulthood. It is, as you know even if you haven't seen it, a hugely histrionic and overheated movie, but it's also fully genuine and fascinatingly weird. I hit this on a whim and am a bit flustered now; I'm afraid of what my dreams will bring tonight.

The Rack, Arnold Laven (1956)

One of the saddest movies you'll ever see. It has the awkwardness and claustrophobia of a funeral from the very first frame. Paul Newman spends two years in a North Korean prison camp. When he gets home, he's charged with collaborating with the enemy. It becomes clear that if he did provide aid and comfort to his captors, he did it to protect his comrades and/or because he'd been driven insane by torture. The tragic logic of the prosecution is eerily reminiscent of so many contemporary stories. Why was Muhammad Ismail Agha, fourteen, sent to Guantanamo? Because he's a terrorist. How do you know he's a terrorist? Because he was sent to Guantanamo.

Ketchup

Sometimes the rate of my consumption of culture outpaces my capacity to reflect upon it. Here's what's passed through my head of late:

The Wire, David Simon et. al. (2002-2008). I believe this displaces The Sopranos as the best television I've ever seen. If you've seen it you already know what I'm talking about; if you haven't seen it, you should. There were of course some passages that were more successful than others--I for one found the invented serial killer idea too clever by half--but on the whole this is a masterpiece. I was very sorry when I ran out of episodes, but then I realized that this story is of course far from over; all you need to do is read the Sun paper now and then and imagine the episode Simon would have wrought from the day's news. Here, this one took me about forty seconds to start scripting in my head.

Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison (1999). What a pleasure to read Harrison's collected nonfiction about Leelanau by a lake just northeast of Muskegon on a July afternoon.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion (2006). What a pleasure to read Didion's collected nonfiction in the air over California's central valley. Old and new favorites. Too bad this edition's pages are so thin.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1942). Oh my stars. I'm only on page 500 or so of the some 1200, and I'm going to have to put this away now that school's started, but I feel like it's OK not to read this straight through, and I also, frankly, feel like I've mostly gotten what's on offer here, namely deliciously incisive diagnoses of a grand society striding confidently toward the edge of a cliff. I can't think of any other novel that so decisively nails the 20th century's disastrous obsession with progress. "With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones, or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers." Paging Ross Perot.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polankski (2010). Whew, Polanski's just oozing decadence these days. This is supposedly a thriller about a CIA plot to, you know, take control of everything, but Roman can barely be bothered to flesh out any of the absurd plot points; he's too busy setting up beautifully lit shots of fog and sad adulterers. Beautiful photography, but not really a movie. The amazing house on the beach at Sylt receives more attention from the director than do any of his stars.

The Green Zone, Paul Greengrass (2010). Essentially a continuation of Greengrass's Bourne movies, in that Matt Damon takes on the entire corrupt U.S. military-industrial complex and wins. This one is purportedly set in the "real world," though, namely Baghdad's green zone. The movie is absolutely absurd, but the takeaway for the action movie crowd at the mall is that their government lied to them about Iraq, and that's a truth I'm delighted to see promulgated as widely and effectively as possible.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine (2006). Muddily structured but useful. I really had no idea this was going on when it was going on.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009) does for 20c European history what Bergman's so-called "trilogy of faith" (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) did for God. Namely, shows it to be incomprehensible and cruel, but absolutely beautiful to look at in luminous black and white. Go back and look at those Bergman films, though, and then look at this again, and see if you don't feel, as I did, how creepily clean Haneke's images are. Maybe I've been spending too much time in Lightroom, but The White Ribbon feels like a masterpiece of post-production as much as anything.

Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh (1949). Walsh remakes High Sierra as a western, with Joel McCrea in the Bogart role. Nice enough for a Sunday afternoon, particularly if you like Virginia Mayo, which I do, but a minor Walsh by any measure. I like the hideout in the ruined village of Todos Santos.

Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955). Sturges also directed The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Eagle Has Landed, among many others. Notice a theme? Manly men in conflict with other manly men. This one fits. A strange and small picture, in which Integrity (played by Spencer Tracy) squares off with Deceit (Robert Ryan) and comes out ahead. Atmospheric and nice to look at for a while, but finally the claustrophobia that Sturges is trying to engender just turns into tedium.

A Single Man, Tom Ford (2009) has its affecting moments, but is mostly, probably predictably, an exercise in style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if the style brings pleasure. Some here does--lots of beautiful California summer light, lots of fantastic bric a brac to ogle--but someone really should have steadied Ford's hand on the post-production dials; the gimmick where he keeps making people pale when they're sad and rosy when their faith in humanity (and/or libido) is restored is tacky and emberrassing.

Band of Brothers, various authors (2001). The Pacific is way better, and do you know why? Because this is pre-9/11 triumphalism, and that is post 9/11 realism. That's oversimplifying, but really, the difference is amazing. In Band of Brothers, PTSD is represented as tough luck that befalls the weak. In The Pacific, it's clearly shown that those who appear not to have PTSD are the truly weird ones. Like I said, The Pacific's a great example of how our understanding of historical realities is shaped by our present historical circumstances. So is Band of Brothers, unfortunately.

Music in rotation: Tosca, Up Bustle & Out, Jazzanova, Cal Tjader

The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston (1950)

Some noirs excite and energize; others depress and enervate. I tend to prefer the former films, but I make an exception for this beauty, one of the most laconic and unforgiving heist films I know of. It's nearly classical, the way you can see the disaster coming from the very beginning, and know there's no way to avoid it. Poor Doll Conovan, poor Angela Phinlay, poor Dix Handley, poor us all.

On Dangerous Ground, Nicholas Ray (1952)

A formulaic, even hackneyed noir in terms of its plot and script, but the mise-en-scène, even in this muddy crap copy on TCM, is exquisite. In the gritty city, space is terrifyingly claustrophobic and dark; in the wintry countryside, space is terrifyingly desolate and blinding. As complex and pure as a glass of water or a Freudian case study. Ida Lupino!

Bob le Flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville (1956)

Not an American gangster movie, and not a Godard-like parody of American gangster movies, and not exactly an homage to American gangster movies, either. I guess I'd have to call it a kind of translation of American gangster movies into French, since Bob and his compatriots are so utterly French in the way they conduct their affairs, and make and carry out their plans. Can you imagine an American movie gangster sitting around chatting over coffee this much? No way. Here guns are afterthoughts rather than the stars, your style matters more than your actions, and the talking! These guys love talking so much, it's a miracle they ever remember they're supposed to be out doing crime.

Tons of fun, great to look at. Isabelle Corey is a fox.

Smiles of a Summer Night, Ingmar Bergman (1955)

Say "Bergman" and most folks will think of Death leading his charges to the underworld in The Seventh Seal, or maybe Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann driving each other insane in Persona. Here, though, we have one of the warmest, sexiest, cleverest, earthiest romantic comedies of all time; it's a Bergman too often overlooked. It was this, not Shakespeare, that Woody Allen paid homage to in his Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Beautifully shot and packed with delights. If possible, see it in a hayloft with your sugar dumpling, with a bottle of schnapps to split.

Macao, Josef von Sternberg (1952)

See, why can't they do this anymore? A brisk 81 minutes, and every single one of them worth watching. I had not known about this (thanks again, Robert Osborne). It's a natural companion to von Sternberg's Shanghai Gesture, which also features a wonderfully decadent Orientalist den-of-iniquity vibe, though clearly its inferior in both style and content. Good lord Jane Russell's a terrible actor. But she's got nice chemistry with Mitchum, and there are also ninjas and sampans and corruption and diamonds and knives which emerge from the darkness and flash in the moonlight and the giant spindly shadow of a tumbling basket of lottery numbers cast across the wall and Johnny Mercer songs and Gloria Grahame saying to Mitchum, as she frees him from his captors, by way of explanation, "When you leave town, be sure to take the canary." Perfect.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Nunnally Johnson (1956)

Watch this, read this, figure out some way we might learn something someday. Thanks.

Seriously, though. This movie's hugely melodramatic. But it's also absolutely serious. I found it quite affecting.

Rancho Notorious, Fritz Lang (1952)

Earlier this summer I mentioned on this blog that I'd long ago resigned myself to never seeing this movie, since it seemed to be out of print. A sympathetic friend -- one of the approximately six people who I think read this blog on occasion -- saw this comment, and, through some sort of probably larcenous interweb wizardry, made a little dream come true. My thanks, friend. I'm glad not to have had to go to my grave without seeing this curiosity of the Lang oeuvre, which has loomed so large in my imagination for so long.

"I wish you'd go away and come back ten years ago," says Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich) to Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy). Sounds like a cry of doomed love from a standard oater melodrama, but, as usual, Lang's up to a lot more in this movie than immediately meets the eye. We have here, again, as so often in Lang (and Hitchcock, and Mann), the good man driven to madness by evil. But Lang's sense of good and evil is so much more decadent than either of these others. Good and evil aren't moral successes or failings in Lang; they're accidents of fate. Lang wanted to call this picture "Chuck-a-Luck," which of course didn't pass muster, because it's ridiculous. It's the right title, though: Chuck-a-luck is the name of a game of chance which sets the plot in motion, and chance is the determinant for all that follows. The main bad guy of the movie, Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer, who is terrific here, though I kept fantasizing Dan Duryea in the role) isn't a bad guy at all. He happened into a situation where he was forced to shoot, was seen to be good at shooting, and so was forced by circumstance to become a shooter. In most westerns, identity -- whether good or evil -- is self-determined. Indeed, the climax of the typical western is the moment when the protagonist finally realizes he is the master of his destiny. In Lang, your identity is thrust upon you by chance, and catharsis comes when you capitulate to this fact. "I wish you'd go away and come back ten years ago." It's the weary, winking kiss/kiss-off of someone who's learned to amor her fati, yet still recalls, vaguely, old times when it seemed she, not chance, got to choose who she'd be.

I'm embarrassed to say I'm a little verklemmt and need to leave it there. But one of these days I should think more about the gender economics of this movie -- Dietrich is basically a pimp whose girls' tricks consist of robbing banks. Many wild horses are broken, etc. No cross dressing, but close; Vern does tear a piece of jewelry from the Altar in a little hissy fit.

Ketchup

All blogging energy still going to Harriet at the Poetry Foundation, but here's what's up on the home front.

Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosowa (1948). Beautifully shot but plodding story of an alcoholic doctor (not unlike Graham Greene's whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory) determined to treat a self-destructive mobster with TB in postwar Tokyo. A kind of allegory of Japan trying to muck out its stalls. There's a bubbling miasma right in the middle of the neighborhood just to remind us of where and when we are.

I Live in Fear, Akira Kurosowa (1955). Patriarch of a large family in the smelting business becomes so obsessed with his fear of nuclear weapons he insists on selling everything and moving to Brazil. The family doesn't want to go, also doesn't want to disrespect papa. A lot of long anguished silences ensue. Still, it got to me; Mifune's absolutely terrific as the terrified and terrifying protagonist.

The Making of a Chef, Mark Ruhlman (1999). Ruhlman goes to the CIA and writes about what it takes to make it. Lively and engaged journalism, great fun if you're the kind of person who enjoys debates over how dark a roux should be used in the making of brown sauce, which I am.

House of Games, David Mamet (1987). I've probably seen this ten times and it's still really. really. good. It seemed kind of antique when it first came out, and has aged beautifully. The big red convertible seemed Twin Peaksish before there even was a Twin Peaks.

The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst (2008). One of my many guilty pleasures. Read more than half of this on a day of LGA delays while listening to Radian on the iPod. Was almost happy!

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer (2008). Probably the most significant and comprehensive account of Richard Cheney's efforts to secure unlimited and incontrovertible power for the executive branch, and the inevitable results. The accounts of Jack Goldsmith, Dexter Filkins, Seymour Hersh, Phillipe Sands, and others are certainly also worth reading, but this one is the one to read if you're only going to read one, in my opinion.

Beacons of Ancestorship, Tortoise (2009). Yuck! Way too noisy. Sounds like high school students covering Can songs. Had to listen to Millions Now Living ten times before I was able to forgive the lads for this betrayal of my love.

Dying City, Christopher Shinn (2008). This rather lightweight play, which uses the device of identical twins to investigate certain dualities to be found in human nature, was, amazingly, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Weak.

A lot of drama in current rotation. Bert Brecht (esp. Galileo). Georg Büchner (I hesitate to mention this name, since I am loving this book so much I don't even want anyone else to know about it. Do you ever get that way about a book? It's a weird feeling.) Mark Ravenhill (wildly overrated). Suzan-Lori Parks (fantastic, esp. Venus, but all of it is terrific). Genet, Lorca, Peter Weiss. On deck: Edna Walsh, von Kleist, Wolfgang Borchert.

TV worth watching: Smith. You can only watch this if you have DirecTV, and there are only seven episodes. CBS produced and then killed it in 2006-2007. It's very good; Ray Liotta's character has a lot in common with DeNiro's in Mann's Heat.

TV which might be worth watching; I can't really tell: Weeds. I find this show very disconcerting, but completely addictive. It's so weird. What does it even mean? Cheech & Chong + Three's Company + Good Fellas. Or something like that. I suspect if I lived in California, it would just seem like a reality show. As it is, I'm bewildered but fascinated.

The Big Heat, Fritz Lang (1953)

Lang's three best Hollywood pictures are Fury (1936), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat. Of these, the first and last have a great deal in common. In both, an honest, hardworking guy of no particular mettle is transformed into a veritable avenging angel after he's screwed over by what we used to call "the system." (Do we still call it "the system"? It's probably got a fancier name now.) Fury, though, is about the impenetrable and inscrutable systems of small towns; The Big Heat is about the big city, Chinatown-style.

The great Gloria Grahame gets some of the best lines here--surveying a cheap motel room: "Say, I like this. Early nothing!"--but lord almighty, does she pay for her gaudy patter. A scarface to rival Scarface. She gets to die on a mink, though.

Funny how the sinister mobster who runs the world in this picture seems like an adolescent shoplifter compared to Dr. Mabuse.

The Blue Gardenia, Fritz Lang (1953)

One of the great Lang noirs. As in The Woman in the Window, a good egg (in this case Anne Baxter, best known, probably, as the Eve of All About Eve) is accidentally drawn into a murder case. And also as in The Woman in the Window, the female lead is half real, and half imaginary. In the earlier film, the imaginary aspect was the product of a dream; here it's the result of newspaperman Richard Conte's desire to sell papers. Conte conjures a sensational story about "the Blue Gardenia Murderer" where none existed, but ironically, his representations begin to reify as the picture goes on. (Tell everyone your kids were abducted by a nonexistent black guy, and pretty soon he'll exist.)

Lang's been in Hollywood for nearly twenty years when he makes this, but it's the first of his films that seems utterly of Los Angeles. Note the background of the title card: freeways. (Then consider the vapid promise of the word "freeway.") Nearly all the characters are either vain, predatory, needy, self-deceiving, or some combination of these, and all are marked by a tendency to overvalue appearances and despise the real. I know these are all hallmarks of film noir in general, but there is no moralizing in Lang's noir, as there in in Preminger's; no relish, either, as there is in Fuller's and Mann's; no charm, as there is in Hitchcock's and Huston's; no joy, as there is in Wilder's. Lang's noir is analytical. He watches and takes note. This is why his two greatest noirs--The Blue Gardenia and The Big Heat--are so dispiriting to watch. There's no one to love or hate or fear, there are only people being people: mean, grubby, and small. Don't see it with someone you love.

Clash by Night, Fritz Lang (1952)

Airless Odets working class melodrama originally set on Staten Island, transposed by Lang to a cannery town in California. Barbara Stanwyck is vicious and terrific as the local girl who can't be satisfied; Marilyn Monroe seems rightly amazed to be here at all as the local girl who can; Paul Douglas is the golden retriever husband who keeps fetching for Stanwyk no matter how often he's kicked; and Robert Ryan is the needy gorgeous drunk all the housewives swoon for.

Not even in Lang's top fifteen, but it has some moments. How about these lines from Stanwyk: "Aren't there any more comfortable men in this world? Now they're all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears. . . . If I ever loved a man again I'd bear anything. He could have my teeth for watch fobs."

Lang is 62 years old when he makes this. He'll make just ten more, most of them awful, but two of them The Big Heat and The Blue Gardenia, which are among his very best.

I wonder if I'll ever get to see Rancho Notorious. Long out of print, something of a legend in my mind, a kind of cinematic Atlantis.

House by the River, Fritz Lang (1950)

Deliciously poisonous little melodrama featuring eros/thanatos mixups, dark shadows, fratricide, billowing curtains, animal carcasses that wash out to sea with the low tide and back in from the sea with the high ("Back and forth, back and forth!" as one wild-eyed character puts it), physical deformities, contempt for procreation, and -- best of all -- the villain justifies his evil deeds as necessary to his work, because he's a . . . writer! Yum. Brings to mind The Spiral Staircase, Rebecca, and, sure, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. This is the kind of movie Lang made when a studio gave him a free hand but not much money: Elegant and sick.

The Caine Mutiny, Edward Dmytryk (1954)

That's more like it. Dmytryk here rassles Herman Wouk's enormous novel into a taut two hours, and, in the character of Lt. Steve Maryk, offers for our consideration a specimen of that most piteous creature: The honorable person who comes to believe he must do wrong in order to do right. Van Johnson is not a great actor, and Bogart is, so the audience's attention very naturally gravitates toward Captain Queeg. We're further distracted by Lt. Maryk's callow sidekick Ensign Keith, the cynical novelist Lt. Keefer, and the bitter attorney Greenwald who enable, provoke, and resent Maryk, respectively. In fact, when you think about it, it's passing strange that Maryk, upon whose act of insurrection the plot pivots, barely takes up any space in the movie at all. That may, though, be just right. These events comprise the most important in Maryk's life, but for everyone else -- the exhausted veteran, the irresponsible intellectual, the fastidious judges, the ambitious kid, the self-loathing lawyer -- he's merely an example, a screen upon which to project their versions of how things are and how they should be. No one cares about the Maryks of the world; we care only about how to represent their actions in such a way as to advance our own agendas. I'm on the very brink of saying something about Megan Ambuhl right here, but I'm not going to do it, I can see the logic but I can't feel it to be true. Or should I say, I can't find a way to fit it into my agenda.

Ketchup

L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (1997). This has held up well. It's no Chinatown, but nothing is. I had forgotten about the prostitutes who get plastic surgery to look like stars.

The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli (1952). Kirk Douglas is the epitome of Hollywood's necessary evil: the producer. He makes it possible for three ambitious but flawed people -- a director, an actress, a writer -- to achieve greatness, but requires them to sell their souls along the way. They each begin by hating him, but then love him, then hate themselves, then hate him all over again. I remembered this as a bit more wicked and fun; on a second viewing it's a little too mawkish. But it remains one of the great movies about movies, and a nice double-bill with L.A. Confidential. Especially good to watch them back to back in your hotel room at the A.W.P. convention.

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov (1957). VN's fourth written in English, based on his experiences as a visiting professor at Cornell and Wellesley. The depictions of departmental politics remain, I assure you, brilliant. But this is as much or more a novel about exile than it is about campus follies. The structural and narrative games here are nowhere near as complex or resonant as in Pale Fire or Ada, perhaps in part because VN was working closer to lived experience here. A brilliant read for a rainy afternoon in a college town. Don't make the mistake I did and start underlining your favorite sentences; it's easier to underline the handful that aren't perfect.

What Goes On, Stephen Dunn (2009).
Mercury Dressing, J.D. McClatchy (2009).
One Secret Thing, Sharon Olds (2008).
Sestets, Charles Wright (2009).
Thousands of books of poetry published each year, and this is what the Old Gray Lady wants reviewed. If I hadn't had to insulate the basement this winter . . . .

City Dog, W.S. Di Piero (2009).
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Fanny Howe (2009).
Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, William Logan (2009).
These ones I've been living, eating, and sleeping with for months. Review forthcoming in Poetry.

Key Largo, John Huston (1948). Wow. It had been years, and I'd forgotten. Here's a picture that takes place almost entirely in two rooms -- it started as a stage play, by Maxwell Anderson -- but never holds still for a second. Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall are mesmerizing to watch, and Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor play their supporting parts perfectly. Anyone who fancies the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs a triumph of violent suspense should watch the scene here where Robinson makes Trevor, a former showgirl turned alcoholic, sing for a drink. Saddest thing in the world.

Ketchup

I have four major reviews to write by May and I'm freaking out. Here's a summary of recent ingenstions before I go down the rabbit hole.

The African Queen by John Huston (1951) is dispiriting because in order to be a hero a missionary has to dump your gin into the river. I guess that counts me out.

The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan (2008) has in it a cool motorcycle and also The Greatest Actors of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. Jesus. All right, listen, seriously. This movie was very nearly free of content and the absurd circle jerk of critical admiration confuses me. I well understand and have frequently participated in the phenomenon of intellectuals-stampede-to-blockbuster-which-yields-to-cult-stud-analysis-and-also-features-explosions. But this is far from even that. It's one part Rambo four parts water. Notice that everyone who tells you it's brilliant is male and/or owns a Trans Am.

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer (1982) features some groundbreaking and fascinating elucidations of the connections between African music and the blues, some wickedly entertaining interview footage with Muddy Waters, and a whole lot of somewhat repetitive but none the less Dorito-like anecdotes about Delta and Chicago blues musicians.

Burn After Reading by the Coen Bros. (2008) is such a curious waste of time and talent. Every one of these fine actors seems to burrow down into their two-dimensional goofy/manic characters and, basically, disappear. Disappointing. Something could have been made of this, but wasn't.

Charlie Bartlett, by John Poll (2007) is in so many ways excruciatingly dull, cliched, and mawkish, BUT: 1. Robert Downey Jr. and Hope Davis are exquisite actors, 2. Kat Dennings looks a lot like an old girlfriend of mine, and 3. I love the proposition that a 100 tabs of Ritalin could turn a dull high school dance into Studio 54.

Plus Super Chickan. Oh my oh my. Get you some.

The Naked Spur, Anthony Mann (1953)

It's amazing to me that this movie ever got made. It has a very thin veneer of western genre conventions, but just underneath it is a hugely overheated and desperately claustrophobic Freudian melodrama of near-Sirkian proportions. What the hell must people have thought when they went to see this in 1953, expecting to eat some popcorn and watch some Indians shoot their bows and arrows? The story here is purportedly about a bounty hunter forced to take on unwanted colleagues in order to get the job done, but like most Mann pictures, it's really about power, emasculation, the ways in which technology disrupts natural processes, and the fundamental advantages enjoyed by evil in its struggle with the good. I found this movie absolutely dispiriting and enervating, and probably in that regard Mann's oater masterpiece.

Ketchup

Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov. The Da Vinci Code meets The Matrix meets La Femme Nikita. Is AJ all that? Yes, she is.

The Question, Henri Alleg. More bravery in a month than I'll muster in my life.

Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright. Documentary about contemporary English culture.

The Namesake, Mira Nair. Hackneyed narrative transposed onto inscrutable culture attempts to pass as original.

Strategic Air Command, Anthony Mann. Weird one from the great Mann. Made just two years before the Beckettesque desolation of Men in War, this film's a hymn to the constant nuclear vigilance of the SAC. Some of Mann's usual darkness definitely creeps in around the edges, but on the whole it's pretty sleepy.

Operation Crossbow, Michael Anderson. I heart cable WWII flick. George Peppard infiltrates buzz bomb factory. Double crossing and Sophia Loren.

The Thin Man, W. S. Van Dyke. A marriage to aspire to. Makes your liver hurt just to watch.

White Heat, Brenda Wineapple. Delightful account of the correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. My review is here.

Bush's War. Brilliant, comprehensive documentary from Frontline covering the Bush administration's machinations from 9/11 to now. Watch it online. Costs only your time and your lunch, which you'll lose.