The Barnesyard

What can I say, it's been a rough week, and this is the perfect capper to a particularly whiny series of posts. Besides, I'm much more comfortable complaining than I am praising. So Little Richard, kick your feet up and relax for once while I count off the weekly WORST 5. My near-accident you know about, but now...the rest of the story:

5) Viggo Mortensen on The Daily Show, cementing his nomination for the World's Most Boring Human Award, an honor previously bestowed on such somnambulant personalities as Matthew Modine, Noah Wylie, John Larroquette, and Sacramento's own Daniel Barnes. Even worse, the ex-Aragorn concocted an excruciating comedy "bit": pulling plastic lizards and snakes out of his coffee cup. His new film "A History of Violence" looks interesting, but if Viggo didn't slaughter people on screen, he might have no personality at all.

4) The Eagles-Raiders game on Sunday...not the game itself, but the way that the TV broadcast kept cutting to a split-screen of Randy Moss and Terrell Owens whenever one or the other made a catch. I understand that they're ostensible rivals, but the CBS producers treated them like they were Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson at the VMA's. What did they think was going to happen, some sort of tantrum? I know they were hoping to catch some prima donna petulance, but was Moss not supposed to scowl and put on his helmet when the other team scored a touchdown? Football has enough intense rivalries without getting the Britney/Justin treatment.

3) My dentist appointment on Thursday -- I don't want to sound like a bad standup comedian here, but when my dental hygienist cleans and scrapes my teeth, she always mentions the presence of blood as some sort of an ominous sign. Hey doc, how about we switch places and I go to work on YOUR fleshy gums with a sharp metal hook for a while and see how much blood comes out? I'm guessing quite a bit.

2) You'd have thought my worst movie preview moment of the week would go to the new Texas-set, "fact"-based inspirational sports film (the 67th this decade, by my count) about a no-nonsense coach (reiging Poor Man's McCounaughey Josh Lucas, naturally) who brings black students into the basketballprogram, no matter what the small-minded bureaucrats and townspeople think (but is there a scene where the disparate players bond over a choreographed oldies singalong in the locker room? You bet your sweet ass there is!). No, the worst movie preview moment was after the "Harry Potter 4" preview when Darcey said she wouldn't read the J.K.Rowling series becuase "it's too dorky". Well, Miss Darcey, who's the real loser here...me for being a dork and reading the books, or you for going out with said TOTAL DORK? Answer: me.

1) Wednesday night dinner disappointments: first of all, Black Cat Cafe was inexplicably closed for the night. Then, our Plan B restaurant, the 50's-themed Johnny Rocket's, not only served mediocre, overpriced food, but they didn't even have Little Richard on the tabletop jukebox! Buddy Holly, yes; Little Richard, no dice. The way that the Georgia Peach is routinely disrespected in this town, you'd have thought he never held backstage orgies in order to rope Buddy Holly and other male rockstars into bisexual encounters. Shameful, just shameful. Hope to see you at the top again next week, Peach.

Alright, enough of this wah wah wah bullshit (although one should note that I kept my list free of any actual tragic events and instead focused solely on my own myopic view of the world and its inhabitants). Here is what you can look forward to next week on The Barnesyard:

MONDAY: Dare Daniel Part II -- Can your intrepid host make it through the interminable Spike Lee Joint "She Hate Me" without hitting the fast-forward button? Probably not without smoking a few joints of his own. Sure, Monica Bellucci and Bai Ling play lesbians, but is that enough? Tune in Monday morning to read all about it in the usual excruciating and unnecessary detail.

TUESDAY: Duelling reviews Part II, with religious icons Reverend Barnesyard and Rabbi Dub expounding on the 1954 existential French noir "Touchez Pas au Grisbi", starring Jean Gabin.

And, of course, all the usual movie reviews, petulant whining, self-inflation, self-deflation, and verbal flotsam you've come to expect from The Barnesyard. Until then, have a safe and sane weekend, and don't swim in any strange pools.

Now that I'm a grizzled veteran of the blogging game, I can stroke my chin and say grizzled things like that. Oh sure, I don't get all the fancy accolades from the "traditional" press like some bloggers I know. But I can take solace in the fact that no one deserves it more than Becky.

I actually had a moment of crisis this evening as I was returning home with my Chinese food, when I suddenly feared that I had ran out of things to say. Not just topics, but words...I felt that I had used up every single word I know, and many of them two or three times. But then I remembered that I hadn't yet worked the word byzantine into my blog even once, and then several more unused words flooded into my head. Among them: labyrinthine; quaff; testicular; germane; torpor; and racquetball. With that and some padding, I should have enough left for another week's worth of posts. And then the panic can set in. Now how bout another movie review?

"Broken Blossoms" (1919 - Director: D.W. Griffith)

This is the first Griffith film I have watched all the way through (not counting scenes from "Birth of a Nation" shown in film classes), and it's a pretty inauspicious introduction to his work. It's the story of a peaceful Chinese student named Cheng Yuan who travels to the West to spread the word of Buddha, but ends up a ravaged, lonely shopkeeper/opium addict in the rough-and-tumble Limehouse district of London. Richard Barthelmess plays the Chinese protagonist, and as usual, it's not a pretty sight watching a Westerner play an Asian role.

The shopkeeper is in love with a "bruised young body" who haunts the district, a sad and willowy girl (Lillian Gish) returning home for brutal beatings from her father, a loutish boxer named The Battler (Donald Crisp). After a particularly violent encounter, she stumbles into Cheng Yuan's shop and passes out. He nurses her back to health, and they commence a timid romance destined to end in tragedy.

There are a number of striking and beautiful scenes in the film (my favorite was Cheng Yuan, the failed Buddhist missionary to the East, meeting a priest who is "travelling to China to convert the heathens", and wishing him luck). There is also a moral sadness to the finale, as Cheng Yuan resorts to violence to avenge the girl he loves.

However, there is one major problem with the film: it's incredibly slow and boring! The scale is significantly less lavish than Griffith's earlier films, the story is simplistic and insulting, and the acting is hambone by the standards of any era (although all 3 leads went on to reasonably successful careers in the sound era). Even worse, Griffith simply repeats the same shot over and over again with no discernible purpose. This film was made after "Intolerance" nearly bankrupted Griffith, and it feels like the work of a filmmaker who has lost his way.

The story plays out exactly as we expect, with little nuance to the characters and bundles of purply sentimentality (the topper is a repeated image of Gish manually forcing a smile on to her own face, since her character has "never had cause to smile"). This one is for silent film enthusiasts only.

Grade: C.

Once AGAIN, I am running late, so let's go to the capsules:

"Never Give a Sucker an Even Break" (1941 - Director: Edward Cline)

Absolutely bonkers slapstick comedy stars Fields as W.C. Fields trying to sell a screenplay about...W.C. Fields. Story is just an excuse for a brilliant stream of insults, pungent satire, visual gags, surrealist humor (including an airplane with a sun deck and a giant ape playing post office), and of course, the great drunken reprobate himself, besieged by children, women, animals, waitresses, authority figures, and nearly everyone else. Fields' humor isn't for everyone -- he's a mumbling, near unlovable personality -- but I think his sly unpleasantness and focus on minutiae make him the early prototype for Larry David. All that, and the funniest scene in the film doesn't even include Fields -- it features the always flummoxed Franklin Pangborn as a studio head trying to rehearse an execrable musical number on a chaotic soundstage. The story ends with the greatest comedy car chase in film history. "It's a Gift" is still my favorite Fields film, but this manically episodal comedy provides a steady stream of belly laughter.

Grade: A-

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"Corpse Bride"

Here's a movie I wanted to like more than I did. In many respects, this is trademark Tim Burton -- some brilliantly developed macabre visual concepts colliding with barely developed characters, devolving into chaos and a fuzzywuzzy mystical conclusion that does more harm than good. Burton's films are usually eminently watchable, but always get worse as they go along. Depp does OK voice work as Victor, a nervous, skeletal figure roped into an arranged marriage to a rich, sheltered girl voiced by Emily Watson. Practicing his vows in the woods, he accidentally proposes to a dead bride who was killed in the same forest by her fiancee, and she drags Victor down into the underworld. One of the interesting ideas here is that the world of the dead is livelier than the greedy Victorian-esque living world. The problem is that nothing really happens down there, and this idea remains as half-baked as all the rest. The stop-motion animation is, if anything, more accomplished than in "Nightmare Before Christmas", but the songs are ten-thousand times worse and the whole enterprise seems pointless. Great to look at, but the screenplay is an unformed lump of clay.

Grade: B-

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"Flightplan"

Why do bad movies happen to good actors? No, not Jodie Foster, who has been phoning it in ever since "Silence of the Lambs"...but pity poor Peter Sarsgaard (bizarrely miscast as an Air Marshall), Sean Bean, Erika Christensen, and the other talented performers forced to sit around watching Jodie Foster's facial muscles tense up for 90 minutes (she looks unnervingly like Michael Jackson here) as a grieving widow who loses her child aboard a giant midair plane bound for America. Foster's character suspects a terrorist plot involving the crew and passengers, who all gradually come to believe that the child is made up and the woman is mad. This is an attempt to shove a "Bunny Lake is Missing"-type psychodrama onto a "Die Hard" action frame, and the results are less than stellar. Foster's character goes from zero to fuckin' nuts in about 7 seconds, but for some reason she is repeatedly allowed her run of the plane, even after commiting a few terrorist acts herself. So is Foster crazy or was the child kidnapped? I'll let anyone interested discover for themselves, but I will say that the more the film explains and reveals, the more ridiculous and illogical it becomes. Take a rain check on this one.

Grade: C.

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Sorry to give the film reviews the truncated treatment once again, but it's been a busy week and I have a dentist's appointment this afternoon. BUT don't forget to to tune in tomorrow morning for a new twist on the classic top 5. And guess what everybody....I don't have to get stoned and watch The Daily Show by myself anymore, because DP IS BACK!!!!!!!!

Once again, I am running behind, so we'll keep this short. As for Dare Daniel Volume 2, I got a few good suggestions, but the best of the bunch was the A-Max dare of Spike Lee's widely reviled "She Hate Me". As bad as "Girl 6", or worse? Tune in on Monday to find out.

"The Steamroller and the Violin" (1960 - Director: Andrei Tarkovsky)

Charming, dreamlike 45-minute proletariat fable follows daydreaming young violinist and his brief friendship with a terse but kind steamroller operator. A product of state-controlled filmmaking of the Communist era, to be sure, but the colorful imagery and powerful symbolism make it resonate beyond rhetoric. This is the first Tarkovsky film I have seen (it was a sort of graduate thesis for the Soviet filmmaking school), and I was impressed by his ability to invest even the simplest human moment with the vibrancy and inscrutability of a dream. It all leads to a memorable finale in which the boy, who is unable to meet the departing worker at the movies because his mother locks him inside, fantasizes about riding away on the steamroller. This would actually make a great children's film, if parents didn't assume from the beginning that kids are more enchanted by hamburger commercials than imagination and wonder.

Grade: A-

Next: my review of W.C. Fields' "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break"

SACRAMENTO, CA

Famed local blogger/fan dancer Daniel Barnes narrowly avoided a car accident yesterday when some douchebag SUV driver cut him off at the intersection of 21st and Broadway.

Barnes, who goes by the Internet nom de guerre "The Barnesyard", was attempting to make a left turn on to 21st street when the incident occurred. He moved into the left-hand turn lane but was surprised when the SUV in the adjacent line suddenly swerved in front of his car. Barnes slammed on the brakes and turned sharply left into the oncoming traffic lane on Broadway.

For some reason, the SUV also stopped, then drove through what was by then a red light and turned left on to 21st Street, fleeing the scene.

"I just didn't feel like looking before changing lanes," said the SUV driver, Douchewell von Douchenstein of Roseville. "I bought an SUV because of the safety, not because I don't want to wantonly murder innocent people."

"I'm the only person on Earth, so what's the point?" added von Douchenstein. "I'm just one of those people...the type of person who grows up a Red Sox fan, then switches to the Yankees so he can root for a champion, then lathers himself in Red Sox merchandise when they finally win it like nothing had ever happened. You know, a total douche."

Barnes never caught the license plate of the SUV, but found an outlet for his rage by honking his horn for several minutes, even after the SUV had driven out of sight. Local pedestrians decided to look at Barnes like he was a lunatic.

"Sure, that SUV almost smashed into him, then ran a red light to escape the scene, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't gawk at him like he's the one at fault," said one unnamed pedestrian. "After all, we're fucking retarded."

Barnes eventually made it to his destination unharmed, but he was later heard to remark, "Fucking, fucking, FUCKING idiots."

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OK, I got that out of my system. In other news...

"How to Wield Your Nazi"

I found an interesting tidbit in an e-mail from one of the states. It seems that one of the two Michigan Senators, Debbie Stabenow, has decided not to vote for John Roberts' confirmation. Despite the fact that she is in a distinct minority and Roberts' confirmation is practically a layup drill, it still caused Michigan Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis to release this statement:

"Which member of the liberal left owns Debbie Stabenow? Is it the Hitler-wielding members of MoveOn.org? Is it the radically pro-abortion advocates of EMILY's List? Or is it Ralph Neas and his friends, the Hollywood elite? Sen. Stabenow should tell Michigan's voters exactly where she gets her marching orders and how following those orders translates to campaign cash."

Of course, Mr. Anuzis doesn't explain exactly how a person would go about wielding a Hitler (although the reference to "marching orders" is probably a good example). But just in case you were worried that the Roberts confirmation would be enslaved to partisan rhetoric and childish bickering, don't you feel better knowing your worries aren't baseless?

In other news...

"Wise Guy"

I just learned yesterday about the death of Oscar-winning director Robert Wise earlier this month. He was not a great filmmaker with any personal style, but he was a good filmmaker and a true indsustry professional. I'm sure that the obits were filled with references to "Sound of Music" and "West Side Story" and "Star Trek", and that's all well and good, but let's not forget a gritty little 1947 noir called "Born to Kill", a dark drama built around the sexual danger of Lawrence Tierney and an atmosphere of moral turpitude. See it if you can.

Check back this afternoon for reviews of the Tarkovsky short "The Steamroller and the Violin" and the W.C. Fields classic "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break". Also, me and Darcey are seeing "Corpse Bride" tonight, so I will give the dirt on that one tomorrow. In addition, I am still soliciting suggestions for Dare Daniel, Volume 2, so let me have 'em.

Today has been even busier and more chaotic than yesterday (with several near-death experiences), but I didn't want to go a whole day without posting, so here we are. Thanks again to everyone who responded about Dare Daniel 2: Cruise Control...I will pick a new challenge before the end of the week. I have watched a couple of movies in the past few days -- I don't have time to do proper reviews, but since I don't want to fall too far behind, I will go to the capsule review, popularized by Leonard Maltin and TV Guide, and perfected by blues rocker Mick "Fuck Tron" Martin.

"Mondovino" (2005 -- Director: Johnathan Nossiter) Leisurely, engrossing documentary examines the hierarchy and varying philosophies (and sophistries) of the winemaking world to tell a story about globalization and the ways that individuality and originality are compromised by democratization and marketing. Interviews with wine merchants/growers/critics from around the world (including members of a small French town whose Communist mayor helped resist the imposition of a Mondavi winery) give an idea how far-reaching the effects of globalization are. Also striking is that despite the widespread attempts by "family-owned" wineries to market their lifestyle, the business seems to produce an endless stream of imperious fathers, insecure heirs, and emotionally distant familial relationships. Grade: B+

"Pather Panchali" (1954 - Director: Satyajit Ray)

The first in director Ray's Apu trilogy, this heartbreaking family drama is pure emotional and visual poetry. It follows a decade in the life of a poor Bengali family headed by a good-natured, irresponsible father and a mother who is collapsing from the weight of child-rearing duties and the social stigma of poverty. Much of the film is seen though the perspective of their children, with a keen eye for moments of quiet humanity and emotional strain. Full of colorful characters, childlike wonder, and realistic atmosphere. Shouldn't be missed. Grade: A-.

Alright, back to those fucking Michigan budget bills, and hopefully the Barnesyard will be back on track for tomorrow. See you then...

"Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" (2002 - Director: Kaos)

The first Dare Daniel challenge was no easy feat -- just saying the title out loud is believed to cause a new form of brain cancer -- but I proved more than up to it. "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" is a shallow spy thriller utterly devoid of humanity that substitutes action scenes, shitty techno music, train explosions, and Lucy Liu slinking around in a black jumpsuit for plot and character. Despite all this, the movie's terrible!

The story, such as it is, revolves around an ex-spy played by Antonio Banderas (feel free to activate the Subtitle option on your DVD player) who is lured back into the game when he is informed that the wife he thought was murdered is still alive. The secret lies with Sever, another rogue spy, who has just kidnapped the son of an enigmatic spy kingpin in revenge for the murder of her own child. As Ecks gets closer to Sever, he learns that the spy kingpin masterminded both deaths, and that the kidnapped child is really his own son.

Yes, "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" is another in a line of films with the word "vs." in the title in which the word's implied confrontation between the titular protagonists turns out to be largely irrelevant to the story (more, they often share the same third enemy). Why is this? Why tease? That would be like billing a football game as Patriots vs. Eagles, then having the Patriots and Eagles play against each other for only one quarter before joining forces to play against the Falcons.

"Ballistic" is certainly one of the more dehumanized movies I've ever seen. It seems to begin 20 minutes into the story, with no development, setting, or coherence, and continues as such for the rest of the film. Tellingly, when both Ecks and Sever flash back to their deceased loved ones, they see the image of a car blowing up. Not a face, or hair, or laughter. Am exploding automobile. It's as close to an inner life as we get here.

Liu's character is supposed to be some sort of kung fu superspy badass, but the fight scenes are so slow and measured they look like "Kill Bill" rehearsal footage. When she's not fighting, Liu is slinking from shadow to shadow in the aforementioned black jumpsuit, but it's not as exciting as it sounds. Liu also has precious few lines as Sever, leaving Banderas to shoulder the load of the dialogue (and a burdensome load it is). This made me question Liu's commitment to the project -- I was reminded of the scene from "Ed Wood" where they're making "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and Vampira won't talk because she's embarrassed to be in their shitty movie, so Tor Johnson gets all the lines. I don't want to come down too hard on Banderas here, because I've liked him in certain films, but he just always seems miscast as everything except for Zorro or gay.

Eventually, there is a showdown in one of those abandoned industrial sites that action filmmakers love so much, as all three spies start blowing up trains (so many I thought I was hallucinating). Darcey fell asleep around this part, and when she asked what she missed, I had to honestly answer, "They blew up a lot of trains." That was all I could remember, and I'm pretty sure that's all that happened. After some more explosions, Banderas is reunited with his wife and son, and Lucy Liu activates some sort of freaky robot bug to give the kingpin a heart attack. Finally, there is a scene of reconciliation between Ecks and Sever over the beautiful Vancouver skyline.

I will give "Ballistic" credit for originality in that it's the only film I've ever seen that was obviously shot in Canada to save money that didn't try to pretend it was set in New York or Chicago or Seattle. There are so many aerial shots of the city and references to Victoria Island, it would be almost impossible to miss. And of course, we all know what a hotbed of international espionage and political intrigue that Vancouver freakin' British Columbia is!

In many respects, "Ballistic" is the epitome of dumbed-down international filmmaking (and you'll be happy to know it was co-produced by Showtime After Dark auteur Andrew Stevens) -- get a couple of names for the posters, cast an international cast for tax breaks and overseas financing, explode enough things to fill a 60-second preview, get some house music for the soundtrack, hire a music video director, shoot it in Canada, skip the plot and call it a movie.

At the end of the day, it's not the worst movie I've ever seen -- unlike "The Terminal" or "Something's Gotta Give" or "The Brown Bunny" or "Northfork", my mouth was refreshingly free of bile at the end. "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sevre" is fast and stupid and harmless and should never be seen by anyone.

Grade: D+

Any suggestions for Dare Daniel 2? C'mon give me something good, right in the ol' breadbasket. Check back later today for my review of the documentary "Mondovino". Until then, there's nothing left to say but Go Broncos!

While I assumed this morning would be the usual sleepy Statenet Monday, it turns out I had several hundred pages of unformatted Michigan chart bills to work on. I'm sure that makes no sense to most of you, but to me it means your run-of-the-mill hellday. As for you, my dear readers, it means I will have to further tease you with my review of "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever"...look for it later this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Alright, that's gibberish. But what has been made abundantly clear this weekend is that my long and glorious ride at the top of the office football pool turned out to be short with a glaring lack of glory. I figured the preview for "Two For the Money" that showed up on the TiVo menu yesterday morning was a sign of good things to come, but it was false hope. Many of this weekend's football games were decided in the final minutes, and I was almost always on the losing end. If my beloved Broncos can win it tonight, not only will I be personally satisfied, but it will seriously mitigate the damage and maintain a substantial lead. If not, my 6-point lead entering the weekend will be whittled to 1. My bold pick of the 49ers to upset the Cowboys did not pan out (although it wasn't exactly by 30 points, was it Jesse? Negative 10 for you.), but a last-second switch to pick the Chargers on Sunday night saved my ass. But at this rate, I doubt even the poor man's Al Pacino would deign to pluck me from my dreary cubicle life and bestow upon me a life of unimaginable wealth and influence (only to lose it through my cockiness). Who would be the poor man's Al Pacino? Sadly, it's Al Pacino.

But who cares about this fiddle-faddle? You want to know where "Dare Daniel" debut "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" fits on my revised Top 50 list. Is it #43? How about #26? Or is it the hallowed number one spot? Tune in later today to find out...

"The Thing" (1982 -- Director: John Carpenter)

Alright, look, I'm not Jay Baker, alright? If I was, this review would probably be a lot more awestruck. I mean, I dig John Carpenter -- "Assault on Precinct 13", "Big Trouble in Little China", "Starman"...good times all. I just don't feel the Russell/Carpenter partnership is quite on the level of Wayne/Ford or De Niro/Scorsese, or even close for that matter.

"The Thing" is a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks potboiler (which I also just watched for the first time a few months ago -- that film was credited to Christian Nyby, but even Nyby admits that it was a ploy by Hawks to give his longtime assistant a Director's Guild card as well as distance himself from the then-disreputable sci-fi genre), and it is supposedly closer than Hawks' movie to the original novel. But besides the confines of the Arctic outpost and the threat of a manipulative alien presence, there aren't many similarities between the two films.

Hawks' movie is a taut, low-budget thriller with the director's usual stylistic brio and snappy dialogue, and probably the first film to fit Cold War-era fears into the sci-fi genre (by the end of the decade, it was already old hat). Carpenter's is a sprightly, splattering gore-fest, replete with exploding heads, stomachs swallowing hands, and countless engorged alien tentacles. Both films are fun but flawed.

Kurt Russell actually underplays nicely (except when he's wearing his snow sombrero, of course) as McReady, the leader of the group, who find the remains of a decimated Swedish lab (famous scenes from the original are recreated to represent the Swedish crew) and accidentally allow a shape-shifting alien creature to infect their lab. Since the alien can replicate any living thing perfectly, Russell comes to believe that one or more of his crew have been infected. Much face-eating ensues, most of it quite exciting and well-filmed, and often popping up unexpectedly.

While the Hawks film may be too old-fashioned and small to work effectively next to the bloody horror of Carpenter's version, it runs a tight 87 minutes with little room to breathe. Carpenter's film is more than 20 minutes longer, and most of that time is wasted. There was nothing that prevented Carpenter from tightening it up, so why didn't he? This is what frustrates me about Carpenter...he's a good filmmaker, but he can't seem to help sabotaging his own movies.

But again, this is coming from a guy who isn't Jay Baker. Passionate rebuttal, anyone? Mr. Baker?

Grade (both versions): B.

Don't forget to tune in on Monday morning for the first installment of "Dare Daniel", in which your host watches the Antonio Banderas/Lucy Liu spy film "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever", and lives to tell about it in unnecessary and punishing detail. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Oft replicated, never duplicated...a closer look at the world's week, the sugar in your tea, and the only thing going on the Internet today, it's the World Famous Barnesyard Top 5. Voted on by top industry professionals, tradesmen, councilmembers, and one ballot each for the President and Mrs. Bush, this list focuses on the best and the brightest that our nation has to offer. So without further ado, the ballot...

5) Plant watering day at the household, and a note I found taped to the refrigerator a couple of days before Becky took off for Portugal: "Dear Dan -- Please don't forget to water us. We are the closest thing to children that that dried-up old spinster will ever have. Sincerely, The Plants." After much moral hand-wringing, I decided to show the note to Becky, who assured me that spinsterhood was her choice, and had nothing to do with being dried-up.

4) "The Very Best of Badfinger", because I'm listening to it right now and it's KICKING MY ASS, especially "Name of the Game". I feel like I've been wasting my life eating, sleeping, and loving when I could have been listening to that song over and over on my headphones. DP once told me that the lead singer killed himself because he was bummed out that he wasn't recognized as the greatest songwriter of all time or something like that, but this seems like classic DP fact-garbling. The rest of the story, anyone?

3) Interesting head-wear witnessed this week: Kurt Russell's flyin' sombrero in "The Thing", everyone's hair in the "Aeon Flux" preview, and Mickey Rourke's face.

2) Free food on Tuesday at StateNet. I have worked here for 11 months now, and this is only the second time the company has splurged for an employee lunch party -- the other time was Xmas, so that turkey sandwich wedge and baggie of Dorito's felt like a gift from Santa himself.

1) And at number one, the envelope if you please...oh, I can't quite make out the writing...why, it's none other than our own Little Richard, the Georgia Peach, for the 390th week in a row! Come on up and accept your award, Mr. Richard! Care to play a little bit of "Good Golly Miss Molly" for your fans? No? Maybe next week, then? No? All right......he's a little shy, folks! Thanks again to all who entered and better luck next week.

Coming up this afternoon: My review of John Carpenter's "The Thing".

Movie #216: "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" (2005 - Director: Scott Derrickson)

Reserved: One kneecap to the yarbles for whoever had the brainstorm to make "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" into a courtroom drama. This is a story about a sweet young girl from a small town who moves away to the big city and the teeming sin of university life, becomes possessed by a host of freaky demons, and ends up killed in her hometown during a failed exorcism. So why do we end up watching the most boring John Grisham film ever made, when setting it up as a detective story or a straight exorcism film would have worked so much better? Several genuinely scary scenes of demonic possession and melting faces are unfortunately shoehorned into a film that spends most of its time playing a game of "Who's the Dumbest Litigator?"

Is it Laura Linney as the ambitious agnostic lawyer tapped to defend the priest on charges of negligent homicide, who wants her name added to the firm's letterhead but can't think to object when the prosecutor introduces material evidence during his opening remarks? Or is it Campbell Scott as the devout but tenacious prosecutor, who stays quiet for two days of testimony about demonic possession and spiritual "openness" before expressing his mild displeasure? Or could it be Mary Beth Hurt as the stern judge, who won't allow badgering of the witnesses but will allow expert testimony on God'emotional state to be entered into the court transcript? Everybody wins but the viewer.

This is all quite unfortunate, because as I say, the exorcism scenes work so well you wish they had a film of their own. Darcey felt they were even scarier than "The Exorcist", although I feel that Friedkin's film possesses a psychosexual perversity and a terror of female pubescence that makes it all the more disturbing. We learn almost nothing about any of the characters in "Emily Rose", least of all Emily herself, trapped as they are by the mechanics of the courtroom genre.

That said, I wanted to like "Emily Rose" more than I did, but it is doomed by terminal silliness. A demonic presence seems to be haunting Linney during the trial as well, and the priest warns her that the trial is a lightning rod for dark forces. But all I could think was, why does the Devil care about bad publicity? Have the demons been following the trial on Court TV? And why does the Devil have to skulk around like a bad-movie thug or that bald guy who followed Tom Cruise through the streets in "Eyes Wide Shut"? You're the devil! If you're bold enough to walk the streets and commandeer a coed's body, you don't have to go sneaking into shadows to scare the shit out of people.

Even worse, the ending is a copout of "Eye For an Eye"-esque proportions, and we don't even get to see the exorcism that causes her death! For some reason, it doesn't come up during the trial.
If you must, check this out at home where you can fast-forward through the dross.

Grade: C.

Coming up tomorrow: the beloved and always controversial Weekly Top 5 list! Will Little Richard take the title again? Or is it up-and-comer Buddy Holly's time to shine? Tune in tomorrow and find out...

Movie #215: "Burden of Dreams" (1982 - Director: Les Blank)

Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" is about a near-deranged opera lover with noble but impossible ambitions who ventures into the Peruvian jungle, enslaves an Indian tribe, and after many fits and starts and a few deaths, manages to pull an entire three-story boat over the side of a mountain using only ropes, pulleys, and manpower.

Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" is about a near-deranged filmmaker with noble but impossible ambitions for an epic film who ventures into the Peruvian jungle, pays the local Indians 3 dollars a day for slave labor (twice the going rate, we learn), and after many fits and starts, manages to pull an entire three-story boat over the side of a mountain using only ropes, pulleys, and manpower (and a broken-down tractor).

This is the power of Les Blank's documentary about Herzog's obsessive quest to complete the filming of "Fitzcarraldo"...much like "Hearts of Darkness" (the doc about the making of "Apocalypse Now"), "Burden of Dreams" shows us how much we see on screen in the film "Fitzcarraldo" was a product of the madness offscreen, as a visionary filmmaker risks lives to realize something immense and unfilmable with as much locational verisimilitude as possible.

It took more than 4 years for "Fitzcarraldo" to travel from pre-production to final shot. Herzog's first location landed him right in the middle of a tribal war. His original leads -- Jason Robards and Mick Jagger -- dropped out due to dystentery and scheduling concerns, respectively, halfway through the shoot (although the few plodding scenes we see indicate this was a blessing in disguise -- and otherwise, we might never have gotten to hear "Tattoo You").
His second attempt was plagued by Indian attacks, a plane crash, unseasonable dry spells, long gaps stuck in the jungle between shooting days, and the mammoth problem of the ship, which Herzog insisted on shooting with minimal artifice.

However, there are many indications that Herzog exacerbated the miseries and prolonged the shoot by turning the film into a personal challenge. He chose a remote jungle locale 1500 miles from the nearest city, claiming the heat and madness of the jungle (the vile obscenity of which Herzog describes at length in a brilliant monotone monologue) would bring out special qualities in his cast and crew. He also insisted on pulling the ship up a risky 40-degree angle, instead of the 20-degree angle the system was designed for.

"Burden of Dreams" is compelling stuff, especially as a companion piece to a film that I feel is Herzog's best, but also flawed. The photography is sometimes striking, but mostly ponderous, as the camera drifts away listlessly while someone is talking. The ending is also pointlessly abrupt, and we see none of the scenes of a raving Kinski featured so prominently in "My Best Fiend". Still, it's worth a look for fans of Herzog and filmmaking.

Grade: B+

Next up: My review of "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"

First of all, congratulations to the Sacramento Monarchs, who employed their usual pesky defense and dominant rebounding to defeat the Connecticut Sun and win their first ever WNBA championship last night. They will have mantle space reserved in the Sacramento Hall of Champions, alongside the Sacramento Surge's WLAF title, the Sacramento Knights' indoor soccer championship, Molly Ringwald's performance in "Sixteen Candles", and Sutter's Fort. Perhaps the Kings will have an exhibit of their own one day, but for now they will have to pay the admission price like everyone else. There is a parade scheduled to begin at 5 pm today that will end with a rally at City Hall if anyone is interested.

Worst Monarchs moment of the season: The network reporter who asked this question of the Maloof brothers at the trophy ceremony: "We all know you're both huge Monarchs fans (yeah, to the extent that the team goes deep in the playoffs and give the Douche twins an opportunity to get their face in front of a TV camera...I mean, they were miked for sound during the game like they do with coaches and players!), so how did the Maloof family will this team to victory?" I changed the channel quickly for fear that I might smash the television with a chair if I heard the answer, but I would hope their reply was something along the lines of, "Nothing! We did nothing! Will to the team to victory? Are you fucking simple? We didn't even know until we read it in the paper that we owned this fucking team!" Something like that.

In other local sports news, the Sacramento Kings season opener has been moved up one day. Their scheduled trip to New Orleans to play the Hornets on Nov. 4 has been changed to a Nov. 1 contest in Oklahoma City, the Hornets' new home for most of the season.

*****

I still haven't been out to see anything new this week, but me and Darcey are probably going to the theater tonight, possibly to see "The Exorcism of Emily Rose". I am about two-thirds of the way through "Burden of Dreams", the documentary about the making of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", but I can't review a film I haven't finished, so read all about that tomorrow as well.

As for the first installment of "Dare Daniel", I have chosen to accept the Conway Challenge and moved the Antonio Banderas/Lucy Liu potboiler "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" to the top of my Netflix queue. Will it be the worst film ever made, or only almost? Tune in on Monday morning, and read alllllllllll about it in the usual excruciating and unnecessary detail.

I had another idea for a semi-regular interactive column that could be fun. However, I should preface this by saying that we got free Togo's sandwiches at State Net this morning, and a couple of people haven't felt quite right. So this idea may just be a product of turkey and mayonaisse eroding away at my frontal lobe.

The feature is called "Dare Daniel". The idea is that you guys come up with a movie -- new or old -- and dare me to watch and review it. Everything is fair game here, including the movies listed a couple of weeks ago on my list of movies that I never want to see. However, I have to stipulate: no "Northfork". It's bad for me, but more importantly, it's bad for society. Also, it would be better to watch something I've never seen before. So let's hear some suggestions for "Dare Daniel". I'll pick a good one on Wednesday, watch it, and have the review up by Monday.

Movie #214: "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1959 - Director: Alain Resnais)

No one loves a boring old black-and-white French film more than your friend The Barnesyard, but now that I am reviewing every movie I see here, I have to actually start paying attention and then trying to make sense of them. Bullshit!

Resnais' debut feature (after a series of documentaries on painters and the Holocaust) was released the same year as Godard's "Breathless", and those films are largely credited with jumpstarting the French New Wave. There are a lot of similarities -- elliptical narratives with elements of fantasy, the use of documentary elements amidst elements of artifice, the ways that film is linked to identity and memory -- but while Godard's debut was an explosion of style, Resnais' is more inward and wounded, haunted by time, tragedy, and madness. That is not to say that "Hiroshima Mon Amour" ain't some pretentious-ass bullshit, because it is. But the vague talkiness of the picture is more than redeemed by a series of striking images and ideas, including the opening images of two bodies intertwined as nuclear ash (or a cleansing snow? it's the first in a series of images that Resnais leaves wide open for interpretation) floats down upon them that cuts into documentary images of the horrors of the vaporized Hiroshima.

The two lovers are a French actress and a Japanese architect who meet and conduct a brief, passionate affair in the rebuilt Hiroshima. As the lives of the characters are slowly brought into focus (they include spouses and children, we learn), we begin to wonder if one or the other might be a fantasy, especially when we learn of the woman's madness and her illicit affair with an enemy German soldier in her French small town during the war.

There are so many ambiguities and subtlely twined yet undefined thematic strands throughout "Hiroshima Mon Amour" that many of them evaporate into thin air, but much of it plays off the dichotomy of forgetting to preserve sanity versus remembering to give meaning. The city of Hiroshima represents the ultimate moral ambiguity of the film -- a scene of unimaginable death and destruction that nonetheless ended a monumental world war, a ghost town repopulated and reinvigorated by youth. Little of it holds together, but the moments will stay with you -- the lovers getting trapped in a staged peace march that speeds nearly out of control; the man reaching over an old woman to offer his a lover a cigarette in a train station; an indifferent pick-up scene in a tea garden, and so on. No classic, but worth a look if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Grade: B.

Well, I didn't end up going to a movie theater last night after all. I guess that means I'm not willing to go the extra miles for my fans...interesting litmus test. I did watch a movie in the afternoon -- Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour", which I will review later this afternoon -- but the rest of the afternoon was spent cleaning the house and watching sports. While my attempt to the next poor man's McConaughey was virtually assured of success with my insurmountable lead in the office football pool, poor Jesse is sliding down the ladder and heading straight for poor man's Matthew Lillard-ville. Tough row to hoe, my man.

Still, the highlight of the night had to be ESPN color analyst Joe Theisman commenting that a young running back's newfound success was due to the fact that "he's running with his legs now." So if there are any young Pee Wee football players out there with pro aspirations, that's an excellent tip from a Hall-of-Famer: run with your legs.

Me and DP used to play a game while watching TV sports in which we would try to guess what combination of narcotics the announcers would have to ingest in order to deliver such nuggets of surrealist inanity. In Theisman's case, I would guess some mescaline, a couple of penetrators, Ritalin, a giant tank of nitrous, and a goblet of cheetah blood. However, the most puzzling player assessment would still have to go to the great John Madden, who said of Jerome Bettis last season, "He's running through darkness!" I'm almost certain you would have to ingest an entire backpack of pure, uncut heroin and then lick King Arthur's sword to get that fucked up.

Look back later this afternoon for my review of "Hiroshima Mon Amour".

Michelle, I don't know if you saw my reply about "Days of Wine and Roses", but in a nutshell, the movie was adapted from a TV production in the 1950's. When they made the film, the first choice was actually Cliff Robertson, but the producers wanted a bigger name and got Lemmon. Thus, it seems pretty unlikely this is a Lemmon "vanity project" extolling AA (although the leads did attend meetings for research). I hope that answers your question.

Movie #213: "The Prince and the Showgirl" (1957 -- Director: Laurence Olivier)

This is a fairly staid stage adaptation directed by and starring Olivier as a Prussian prince who falls for an American actress living in London played by Marilyn Monroe (who also helped produce) who rejects him and falls for him at the same time. This may seem like fluffy stuff for Olivier's final directorial effort after three lavish adaptations of Shakespeare plays (1948's "Hamlet" won the Best Picture Oscar), but it was adapted from a Terence Rattigan play and tangentially deals with world events and diplomacy prior to World War I. Too often, however, it's just stuffy Europeans disconcerted by the slinky and shocking Monroe.

Olivier's prince, a widower, arrives in London to attend a coronation ceremony, but the strategic advantages of his country make him an attractive partner to the Brits, who are eager to see him mollified at every turn. The prince attends a show, and invites a dewy fresh chorus girl (Monroe) back to his room. The girl is intimidated at first, but as the prince goes through a seduction routine so mechanical even he seems disinterested in it, she laughs out loud at his adolescent sloppiness. Since women have so easily fallen under his spell of wealth and influence, he is distressed by this rebuke, but the showgirl sees how lonely and devoid of intimacy his life is and she falls for him anyway.

The movie is watchable but full of flaws -- there is a rickety, poorly attached subplot involving the prince's young son, who may be attempting to relieve his despotic father a little early. The picture is extremely setbound except for a few impressive rear-projection shots and a great scene of Monroe's realization at the coronation that she is living a little girl's dream. Olivier's impeccable framing and production design help open it up a bit, but the events of the story can't help but feel disconnecteed and small.

The biggest problem with "The Prince and the Showgirl" is the uneasy chemistry between Olivier and Monroe -- she is charming as ever, but the great English actor plays his monocled Prussian prince with such blustery hamminess he keeps edging the production towards broad comedy. He never seems to find the right note (or accent), and barely acknowledges Monroe's glittery presence.

The film does provide great sustenance to Marilyn watchers, and the beautiful blonde looks delectable in a series of tight-fitting gowns. Oh by the way, Hollywood, it's not a coincidence that the most desirable and mesmerizing woman in the history of film has a big butt, wide hips, and a noticeable tummy. Give Lindsay Lohan 57 cheeseburgers and a chicken parmesan and figure it the fuck out.

Grade: B-

I think I'm going to head home now, so you're on your own for the rest of the day. However, I will probably see something in the theater tonight (maybe Broken Flowers or Four Brothers or November), so check back tomorrow. Also, me and Dub are working on the second installment of our duelling movie reviews for later in the week or early next week. The next movie will be Jacques Becker's French noir "Touchez Pas au Grisbi/Hands Off the Loot"...so you see, you do have a reason to live after all. See you all tomorrow...

My quest to become the next poor man's McConaughey got a serious boost this weekend when I dominated the office football pool. I correctly called several upsets, including Carolina beating the Patriots and Cleveland winning in Green Bay. At this point, I am so close that I'm thinking of adopting a Texas twang and curling my hair a bit. My soul is primed for the sale, Pacino, make me an offer! Jesse, who won the pool last week, didn't win a single game in the afternoon, so he is well on his way to becoming the next poor man's Skeet Ulrich.

I only watched one movie this weekend -- the Marilyn Monroe/Laurence Olivier film "Prince and the Showgirl", which I will review this afternoon -- so there is not much to write about. I am hoping to get my work done quickly so I can take a half sick day (if anyone from Statenet is reading this, that's motherfucking poetic license!). I have done a bit of a disservice to my loyal readers (your thoughts and prayers have been deeply cherished in this difficult, difficult time) by not seeing many new movies in the theater lately. There is so much good sports and TV coming up that it will be difficult -- football season, 2 Monday Night games, A's in the pennant race, Monarchs one win away from the championship, one month to basketball season, the returns of Survivor, Arrested Development, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Simpsons (although that one last night with Ray Romano deserves a spot on their ever-growing blooper reel) -- but I will go the extra mile for my fans and get into the theaters. Any suggestions?

Allen may have tried to steal my thunder but I have a feeling he bombed about as badly as the movie "Sound of Thunder" did its opening weekend. The movie's failure only proves my theory that despite all the social, economic, and religious differences in this country, we can all find common ground in the hating of Edward Burns. Quite beautiful, really. Without further ado, the top 5 for the week of Sep. 10-16:

5) The return of pro football -- for me, the gridiron ranks third behind baseball and basketball, and the college game does nothing for me at all, but if anyone needed an excuse to watch television and eat like a pig, it's me.

4) Al's birthday dinner at Kimon (sp.?), featuring a new dining adventure called "checking out the food". Essentially, you walk around the table while everyone is eating and inspect their orders. Luckily, I had already finished my meal by the time the checking out began because I don't need someone sticking their head over my shoulder while I'm cramming a large slab of tuna in my mouth. That's when earlobes get lost, mister!

3) The Evolution Schmevolution week on The Daily Show was a bit of a disappointment (where the hell was Stephen Colbert and This Week in God? -- luckily, Colbert's new show will be airing after Daily Show at 11:30, though I'm not sure when it debuts), but I was still amused by a panel discussion of creation/evolution "experts". Most intriguing/alarming was a "metaphysical theorist" whose concept of the universe as a 12-box virtual reality grid encased in a crystal dome of shared consciousness made slightly more sense than the obfuscating ramblings of an "intelligent design" proponent. With its ungermane anecdotes and unwillingness to define itself, it appears that the only impetus behind intelligent design is, to quote Kent Brockman, to "tug at the heartstrings and fog the mind." There are millions of people in the world, including Darwin himself, who have been able to reconcile the scientific realities of evolution with their faith in an almighty being. Not that hard.

2) NBA.com has ranked the Kings eighth in their preseason power rankings (about what we all supposed, I should say), though with the caveat that Shareef and Bonzi need to learn to play in the Kings' unselfish team system. I would extend that further to say that Peja, Bibby, and Brad Miller need to prove the same thing, since this is their first full term as the grizzled veterans of the team (and their playoff showings last year were all pitiable). Still, NBA.com has us ahead of several good-looking teams like Dallas, Seattle, Cleveland, Philly, and New Jersey.

1) And, at number one, for the 379th week in a row...that's right, it's the Georgia Peach, Little Richard himself! Thanks again to all the entrants and better luck next week!

Well, I didn't go to Hooters after all, and the Monarchs ended up folding in overtime, so it was a rough night all around. For those who didn't watch the game, Connecticut tied it at the end of regulation with a three pointer, and the Monarchs fell apart in overtime. Is it just me, or did the spirit of Rick Adelman enter the body of John Whisenant in the last few minutes? Although even Adelman would have hard time explaining why you take out your shooters, stop fouling, and essentially concede a three-possession game with over a minute remaining. A disappointing showing all around. Of course, the local ladies can still win the series in Sac. with a couple of home victories (games on Sun. and Tues. if you're interested in attending), but they sure looked like an emotionally decimated bunch on the bench last night. And was I right, or if Katie Douglas the most boinkable player in WNBA history? Not only that, but she talks trash, plays gritty defense, and sports the high socks...a fun player to watch all around...and I do mean ALL AROUND heh heh heh.

If anyone is reading this, go home right now and watch Game 2 of the WNBA Finals featuring your Sacramento Monarchs -- it starts at 5pm on ESPN2, and WNBA games usually run under 2 hours. The local ladies won the first match of the five-game series last night, and coming home next week with a 2-0 lead would make them practically unstoppable. This may be your only chance to watch Sacramento win a pro basketball title in your lifetime, so don't miss this opportunity! Oh yeah, and 6-foot Connecticut Sun guard Katie Douglas may just be the finest female basketball player of all time. I will you see all tomorrow morning when we can discuss further...

I have a lot of work to do, so there won't be much blogging today -- this gives you plenty of time to reread all the old posts and really catch up. I didn't watch any movies last night anyway, just some episodes from season 2 of Ali G. The highlight was the Kazhikstani reporter Borat singing a folk song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in a Tucson cowboy bar that inspired the locals to join in a little too whole-heartedly. There has been talk about going to Hooters tonight, so I will give a full report tomorrow, along with the Weekly Top 5.

This is the first installment of what I hope will become a regular feature here in the Barnesyard -- duelling movie reviews of old and obscure films by me and Mike Dub, with neither of us privy to the other's review beforehand. First in the series is a review of the Howard Hawks adventure "Barbary Coast" starring Edward G. Robinson, Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, and Walter Brennan. The film was released in 1935 by MGM, and as with every duelling review to come, it is available for DVD rental on Netflix.

First on the pulpit, Mr. Barnes:

Movie #209: "Barbary Coast" (1935 -- Dir.: Howard Hawks)

Howard Hawks made a lot of genuine classics (including but not limited to "Scarface", "Bringing Up Baby", "His Girl Friday", "To Have and Have Not", and "Rio Bravo"), but he was also a contract filmmaker who made some oddball pictures that almost feel like non-sequiters. This is a rare lavish MGM production for Hawks that cobbles together a lot of disparate elements that don't always fit together, but are entertaining as individual pieces.

Miriam Hopkins stars as an ambitious gold digger who travels to San Francisco on the promise that she will wed a miner who has struck it rich. When she arrives, she finds that her prospective husband has been killed and his claim taken by Edward G. Robinson, a local casino boss who runs the town like Al Capone. But she is an opportunist, so she latches on to the repugnant crime boss, who sets up her up behind a crooked roulette wheel, figuring miners will gladly lose just to get a rare glimpse of a white woman.

One of the most interesting wrinkles in "Barbary Coast" is the portrayal of Gold Rush-era San Francisco as a lawless, mud-soaked frontier town. This sort of town is usually featured in films set in Texas or Colorado or the Midwest, so it gives "Barbary Coast" the feel of being a Western set against the Pacific. Robinson has the earring and wavy black hair of a swarthy pirate, but he plays the casino boss like one of his gangster roles, and his fits of violent insecurity -- including a brilliant scene where he buys out an entire store rather than allow the snooty mayor's wife to browse there -- practically save the film. He desires Hopkins, but knows she is repelled by him, and it drives him insane with jealously and self-loathing.

Less successful is the romance between Hopkins, who recoils from Robinson's affections and is further alienated by the murders of a couple of losers at the wheel, and a senstive miner played by Joel McCrea. Riding her horse in the rain, Hopkins comes across the cabin of the well-bred McCrea, who is heading back east, and falls in love. Feeling morally unworthy, she deserts McCrea but sees him again in the casino, where she assists in rousting him of his hard-earned claim.

McCrea is an appealing actor, but his character is fairly ridiculous, and like the unnecessary inclusion of a democracy-touting newsman, his scenes play too close to parody. Much better is Brian Donlevy as an iron-eyed assassin, and the inimitable Walter Brennan as a shabby old coot. This film was made earlier in Brennan's film career, and he hadn't quite mastered his persona yet, briskly overplaying every scene. He would become legendary by toning it down a bit for "To Have and Have Not", "Pride of the Yankees", and "The Westerner", but he still lends a lot of squalid atmosphere to the film, including his giggly admission to McCrea, "Most folks don't know how bad I really am!"

This is not one of Howard Hawks classics, but it has a lot of nice elements, a few good performances, and the usual impeccable MGM production design. It's worth a look for fans of the era and its stars.

Grade: B

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And now, let's hear from Mr. Dub.....



In the catalogue of Howard Hawks, “Barbary Coast” is a film that is not often mentioned as a standout of his career. It seems to be lost in the shuffle or drowned out by some of his other accomplishments: say, ten of the greatest films ever made. And it is difficult to argue that it should be mentioned more often. Though he made fifteen or so movies before this one, it is still a relatively early work, and his ambition, always the key ingredient to any of his films, whether they are great or simply good, slightly outreaches his aim on this one.

The film stars Miriam Hopkins as a beautiful money huntress named Mary Rutledge, who has come to San Francisco during the gold rush to marry a gold digger who has struck it rich. When she gets there, she finds that he has gambled away all his money, and his life, to Luis Chamalis (played so perfectly by the always impressive Edward G. Robinson), who owns the local gambling joint, the mayor, the judge, and pretty much everything else in the town. Mary goes to Chamalis, who sees her as the perfect attraction to bring in people to his roulette wheel (she is the only white woman in the unsettled town), and they strike up a bargain of employment. Of course, Chamalis can’t help but fall in love with her, and, frankly, neither would I.

That’s about it for the very basic story. And with this, I don’t have any problems. It’s not “Casablanca,” but it’s very good, driven by absolutely terrific performances by Robinson and Hopkins (and another fantastic supporting performance by the great Walter Brennan), and aided by the energy and rhythm that is so characteristic of Hawks’ work.

But then two problems occur with the film. One is the introduction of Jim Charmichael (played by Joel McCrea), a gold digging poet that Mary runs into during a ride in the woods. He is meant to be shown as the opposite of Chamalis; he is sensitive and loving and gentlemanly, and he carries around a book of Shelly poems. So far so good, except that everything that screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur give this guy to say is so lyrical, so delicate, it comes off not as poetic but simply annoying. I can’t remember a character that has come from a movie as good as this one that I have found so utterly irritating. And that we are supposed to accept that a woman as cold and greedy as Mary would fall for such insipid bullshit is even more frustrating than listening to his dialogue.

The other problem lies in a subplot that revolves around a drunken journalist who is trying to start up the town’s first newspaper. But when his first issue tells the truth about how the town is really run, Chamalis comes and forces him to write only what Chamalis thinks is appropriate. The problem here is again in the script, in the melodramatic speeches the journalist makes, and the overdone theatricality of his scenes.

If there is something that Hawks can be blamed for with this movie, it is that he perhaps should have been a little more focused. He may be trying to do a little too much here, especially with the newspaper subplot, which fits into the movie without too much distraction because Hawks is probably the best director in history at transitioning between multiple storylines, but still somehow doesn’t manage to work. When Hawks narrowed his scope and focused solely on the newspaper genre five years later with the Hecht/MacArthur based “His Girl Friday,” he succeeded in making the single best newspaper movie ever made. But the prime meat of the film is in the scenes between Hopkins and Robinson, and it’s worth watching for those.

Overall rating: B.

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Same likes, same dislikes, same letter grade....what can you say, great minds think alike. I hope everyone enjoyed this and that it will become a regular feature in the Barnesyard. See you tomorrow, friends....

Movie #212: "The Constant Gardener" (2005 -- Director: Fernando Meirelles)

Fernando Meirelles made one of the most remarkable international debuts in recent memory with "City of God", a violent human drama that played like a Brazilian "Goodfellas", so I think there may be a tendency to overpraise his Hollywood debut, an adaptation of John Le Carre's novel "The Constant Gardener". At the same time, it is hard to pin the blame on him -- the movie is full of jittery style and passion about an important global issue.

If anything, "The Constant Gardener" only points out the difficulty in making a narrative genre picture about an important global issue -- the necessary balancing act between the demands of character and plot and the urge to educate and pontificate in the name of the greater good. Meirelles' film isn't the plodding star-fucker fest of "The Interpreter" or the humanitarian debacle of the Jolie/Clive Owen "Beyond Borders", but it sure ain't no "Salvador" either.

Fiennes plays a British diplomat working in Africa who falls for a feisty liberal played Rachel Weisz. The film begins with her violent death, and as Fiennes pieces the story together through flashbacks, he comes to believe that her work exposing the inhumane practices of pharmaceutical companies in Africa led to her demise. As he gets closer to the truth, which may or may not include some sexual dalliances on her part, he begins to put his own life in danger.

Fiennes and Weisz are fine in the leads, but both of them have drawn from their respective wells of impassioned milquetoast and troublemaking sexpot a few times too often. The supporting cast is mostly inept and miscast, and the villians are standard-issue corrupt bureaucrats.

No one has made a feature film about the issue of drug companies using poor Africans as guinea pigs while denying them the treatments that could save their lives. It's an important issue, but polemicism doesn't work well in the context of a feature film. Meirelles whips the camera around frantically and tries to give moral heft to the story, but too often it feels ludicrously heated and the over-stylization is almost laughable.

Again, one wants to absolve Meirelles as much as possible -- he is after all a foreign director working in unfamiliar locations and in an unfamiliar language. However, the film is depressingly literal, and it stands in a long line of Hollywoodized issue films in which noble white folks grieving over the plight of poor foreigners get the spotlight at the expense of those who were actually suffering. It would be like remaking "City of God" starring an American missionary who struggled to save kids from the horrors of the Rio slums.

"Constant Gardener" is also another film in which evil government figures are able to rape, kill, and embezzle with impunity, right up until someone provides evidence of their evil in front of a small gathering of people. It's a pretty unrealistic way for a film with such serious intentions to resolve itself -- if the current presidential administration has proved anything, it's that evidence of wrongdoing is fairly irrelevant, even when it is reported.

Grade: C+

Up next: Mine and Dub's "Barbary Coast" reviews!

Apparently, the Kings are close to signing free agent point guard Luis Flores, who was cut by Denver a couple of weeks ago. No, not Louis "Two Eyes" Flores, the Lou Diamond Philips-esque bad boy of the Tower Theater, but the 6-foot Dominican point guard who spent time with Golden State and Denver last season. Flores doesn't figure to be a major player on the Kings...but the NBA rosters have been expanded to 13 active players this year, and Flores is likely being signed as an insurance policy to play behind Mike Bibby, Jason Hart, and Kevin Martin. However, this does bring the number of likely active opening day Kings players who were not with the team on opening day last season up to nine, with only Peja, Bibby, Miller, and Kevin Martin returning.

This is a saying that I have adopted and taken to repeating ad nauseum now that I am a grizzled veteran of the blogosphere. The blog has taken off quickly, and thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read and comment. In fact, I understand that the "teens" are using the word "Barnesyard" as a slang word for cool, as in "That new System of a Down single is fuckin' Barnesyard as fuck, bre! It would be hella Barnesyard if I had a Kaballah Energy Drink to go with it!", and so on.

And now that Heckasac is taking two-and-a-half weeks off to visit Portugal, I am officially the Only Game in Town. I predict that Becks' absence will catapult me into super-stardom, not unlike Lou Gehrig replacing an injured Wally Pipp at first base and then playing 2130 consecutive games at the position.

I have some work to do this morning, but later this afternoon you can look forward to a review of "The Constant Gardener", as well as mine and Mike Dub's reviews of the Howard Hawks film "Barbary Coast". Riveting stuff, I agree.

Movie #211: "Follow Me Quietly" (1949 - Dir.: Richard Fleischer)

This is a fairly standard issue b-level noir about an edgy cop-on-the-edge played by William Lundigan who obsessively tracks a self-righteous serial killer called The Judge who strikes on rainy nights. The cop is followed around by a bland lady reporter for a pulp crime mag who also represents a bland love interest.

Fleischer packs as much action and style into the film's 59-minute running time as he can, but the story is full of holes and the characters are generally uninteresting. Lundigan smokes cigarettes and rumples his hair with stalwart determination, but compared to Robert Ryan's genuinely tortured (and torturing) cop in Nick Ray's "On Dangerous Ground", this is pretty soft stuff.

The motives of the serial killer are never clear -- nothing is seen of his victims -- although we are led to assume that he is an avid reader of lurid crime stories himself who has been driven over the edge by the big, bad, salacious media, just as a fake confessor is admonished by the cops to "stop reading so many crime stories".

The strangest gimmick of the film is the cop's frequent use of a life-size dummy to help identify the serial killer. They have only strands of evidence -- a hat, a description of height and build, a few strands of fiber -- and for some reason, the cop believes that building a big, faceless dummy out of these parts will catch the killer. He has a bizarre obsession with the dummy -- when the lady reporter prints a story about the dummy, he is outraged. Only he gets to use the dummy! It was like Joel was the chief of police -- "There's a killer on the loose -- let's build a puppet!" If only the cop had found a way to use Earth: 2025 to help catch The Judge, it would have been perfect.

In all, Lundigan's character is a surprisingly bad cop -- when they wait in The Judge's apartment to catch him, they put one guy on the first floor, one on the second, and no one out on the street! Obviously, he's going to run. Me and DP couldn't help but laugh out loud at much of this movie.

Grade: C

I will be seeing "The Constant Gardener" tonight after work, so I will let you know.

I'm about to head home to watch the season debut of Monday Night Football, but before I go, I just wanted to give a big Barnesyard wave goodbye to ex-Kings guard Eddie House, who has signed a deal to play with Phoenix next year. Eddie was never a big contributor (only 50 games last year) but anyone who watches the Kings knows that House is one of those guys who can come right off the bench and hit three-pointers, which is why it's too bad he is still in our division. He probably won't get much time with the Suns either, backing up Steve Nash and Leandro Barbosa, but he has defined himself as a quality role player. Hell, fellow ex-King benchwarmer Damon Jones just got a FOUR-YEAR deal from Cleveland, so maybe House has a nice future ahead.

Movie #210: "The Party" (1968 -- Director: Blake Edwards)

This is a very funny and deliberate slapstick comedy starring Peter Sellers as a pleasant but accident-prone Indian actor named Hrundi who is accidentally invited to the swank party of a studio executive whose epic movie he has nearly destroyed. The threadbare story, slowly building gags, and singular setting recall the works of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis -- there is even a running joke with Hrundi fleeing a scene of wreckage and reappearing ludicrously removed from the action that is a straight nod to Tati's "M. Hulot's Holiday". Edwards also casts Buddy Lester, who did the brilliant crushed hat bit in Lewis' "The Ladies Man" and plays the bartender in "Nutty Professor", as one of the party guests.

Most of the slapstick is fairly standard stuff, but Edwards gives it a lavish widescreen treatment that uses the massive one-set space of the Hollywood Hills mansion to give dimension to much of the physical comedy. As the Indian actor, Sellers underplays it nicely, making Hrundi a reserved but wide-eyed innocent exploring the untouchable world of exclusive upscale parties. He doesn't know anyone at the party (although the guests are so wrapped up in themselves they barely notice him even after he begins to accidentally tear the house apart), and as the only non-white guest he is even more starkly cast as an outsider.

This is not for everyone's tastes, and it gets pretty stupid towards the end, as the appearance of a painted elephant and a bubble bath that explodes out of control steer the tony party towards anarchy in a scene that recalls the centerpiece of Tati's "Playtime". But Sellers is charming and the laughs are consistently earned and brilliantly timed, so it might be worth a look.

Grade: B+

Anyone who knows Dan Barnes knows that I will watch pretty much anything. I've grown more discerning in recent years, but the difference is so slight it's probably not visible to the naked eye. However, there are certain places I will not go...I have compiled a brief (and certainly incomplete) list of films that I have never seen...and pray that I never will. Feel free to add your selections...

-The Sound of Music
-The Passion of the Christ
-Dr. Dolittle with Rex Harrison
-Family Man (with Nic Cage)
-Northfork all the way through
-Cop and a Half
-Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
-any Friday the 13th movies besides the one with Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman
-Bad Boy Bubby
-Star Trek V
-2010
-The Green Berets
-any film version of The Alamo
-The Pacifier
-anything starring Johnny Knoxville ever again
-Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason (too late for the first film)
-any Nightmare on Elm Street movies
-Father's Day (that one with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams...or, any movie that features these two either together or individually)
-Tomb Raider 3 (if they ever make it, I swear I won't go this time...probably)
-Jersey Girl

Any other suggestions?

Anyone who watches the Ricky Gervais sitcom or even the Steven Carell American version (which is better than you might think) will appreciate that FEMA fuck-up Michael Brown inflated his resume by claiming to be "an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight" in Edmond, Oklahoma, while the former mayor of Edmond claims Brown was only an "assistant TO THE city manager". In other words, our federal first-responders in times of national crisis are being run by Gareth.

When me and Allen used to work together at the Tower, he would ask me about once a week for my top 5 list, without any further specification as to the content of the list. As the blog-well has pretty much run dry -- hey, it was a good run -- I have decided to make this a weekly Friday feature. Other bloggers in Sacramento go out to shows or restaurants to get content, but not me! Fat, lazy, and stoned...that's the Dan Barnes promise!

Without further ado, the Barnesyard Top 5 for the week of Sept. 3-9:

Number 5: The Tuesday-Thursday episodes of the Daily Show. Jon Stewart has already proven himself a master of condensing gnarled political scandals and media reports into lucid explanations that are simultaneously edifying and hilarious. But The Daily Show took it to another level this week with a series of stories and satires on Hurricane Katrina. I think Stewart is fast becoming a TV personality/icon in the vein of Carson or Letterman or Koppel or even Cronkite. This may effectively kill any future prospects in films or sitcoms or even stand-up comedy, but to paraphrase DP, he is providing far too valuable a service at this point.

Number 4: Our own Sacramento Monarchs. Like the Kings, these women have been title contenders for several years without getting over the hump. They are in the Conference Finals right now, and need to win only 1 of 2 at home to get to the WNBA finals. Unlike the Kings, these girls play scrappy defense, have strong fundamentals, and pound the boards relentlessly, which is why this may be their year to win it all.

Number 3: Remembering that there's a movie called "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever".

Number 2: Wolf Blizter bemoaning the fate of storm refugees from the safety of the Situation Room: "You see these people, and they are so poor....and soooo black."

And at Number 1, for the 378th week in a row.......that's right, it's the Georgia Peach, Little Richard! Congratulations to all the entrants and better luck next week.

Another semi-regular feature that will be appearing on the Barnesyard next week is dual movie reviews from myself and Mike Dub (aka Barnesyard East). Although I consider myself the most intelligent and authoritative film critic to ever come out of Sacramento, Mike Dub is certainly a close second. Well, maybe not thaaaat close. Close like you might say two planets are close, but really they're like 300 million miles apart. Anyway, it should be fun, so look for it next week -- first up, we'll review the 1935 Howard Hawks/Edward G. Robinson film "Barbary Coast".

Great cover of the Weekly World News, using a shot from "The March of the Penguins" advertising -- "The Secret Lives of Penguins...It's All Champagne and Hot Tubs!" So everyone who thought that movie was whitewashed and sentimental had not idea how right they were. I wonder how the mother who forced her 7 year-old to write into the Sacramento Bee, calling for all theater owners "to watch the movie over and over and over and over again until they get it" rationalizes supporting this hedonistic lifestyle.

Another stupid thing overheard this week: Oakland A's broadcaster Ray Fosse claiming that Joe Blanton "pitched a 1-2-3 inning, except for one hit." So in other words, he didn't pitch a 1-2-3 inning.

There will be another movie review up later this afternoon.

I know Heckasac posted some particularly abominable Train and Jewel lyrics last week, but this bon mot from the Alanis acoustic album playing in Starbuck's may trump them all:

"I've got one hand in my pocket/and the other one's giving high fives"

I literally winced when I heard that one.

I have entered a football pool at work, and since Matthew McConaughey is starring in an upcoming film with Al Pacino as a gifted sports prognosticator, this leaves open the possibility that I may become the next poor man's McConaughey.

Of course, current poor man's McConaughey Josh Lucas fairly cemented his status in one particular scene from the movie "Stealth". Lucas is talking to the engineer of the robot plane, when the craft suddenly blasts some 98-Rockish new metal. The engineer tells Lucas that the plane is constatnly hooked to the Internet, and has downloaded every song in existence. Lucas' reply: "Well, at least it's a good song." It almost brought tears to my eyes to imagine the air-guitar fest on the wing of the robot plane that McConaughey would have brought to this scene. It's hard to settle for a cheap knockoff when the real thing so clearly needs the work.

Up next: My review of "The Loved One"

Movie #207:

Well, I promised a review of the 1953 Mizoguchi classic "Ugetsu Monogotari" this afternoon, but I got a flat tire on my lunch break, and now it is 6pm, I still haven't heard about my car, I haven't eaten all day, my computer has one of those pop-ups that are so high up on the screen you can't click them off, and I have to walk home. So if you're driving through Midtown and see a very dazed and forlorn fella in a green shirt shuffling towards Southside Park, don't forget to roll down your windows and laugh at him. And if you have time, maybe throw some garbage.

As for Ugetsu, it's a brilliant and lyrical Japanese film about two rural couples who are torn apart when a nameless war encroaches upon their village. The men's dreams are shanghaied by the glamour of war--one is a potter exploiting the bustling economy, the other a poor fool who wants to be a samurai. The women stress domesticism and simple pleasures, to no avail. The terror of the approaching lawless armies on the defenseless town brings to mind the experiences of Japanese peasants in the first half of the century, or those of the Vietnamese in the next decade. Mizoguchi brings a touch of cursed grace to so many of these scenes, closer to Ozu than Kurosawa -- the compulsive abandonment of the wives, the desperate stoking of the kiln, the meeting between two boats on a fog-shrouded lake, and a ghost story that blends mysticism, romanticism, and military activity far more naturally and less histrionically than in Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" (a film I find overrated).

"Ugetsu" is a great movie, but even Netflix doesn't have a Mizoguchi listing, so unless you encounter it on cable or buy it on EBay, you may never get to see it. Pity.

Grade: A-

Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and thinking about terrible scenes. I know replaying some of these moments can be quite difficult. I thought about having another discussion about the worst movie title ever, but the winner is so obviously "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" that any other competition would be pointless.

Of course, none of my assertions are inarguable, and indeed, passionate debate and name-calling is quite encouraged. Some acceptable Barnes-ist epithets: fat stupid idiot; stupid fat idiot; douche; douchebag; d-bag; Douchey McDouchealot; or Ty Douchington.

Up next: My review of "Ugetsu".

Thank you to everyone for all the comments, thoughts, and prayers regarding the worst scene in any movie ever. This is a difficult topic for conversation because it can be interpreted many different ways: as a terrible scene that destroys an otherwise exemplary film (see: the graveyard bookends in "Saving Private Ryan", or most of the Spielberg filmography), as a cracked beacon of lowbrow insanity in a sea of mediocrity (see: the refugee rave of "Matrix Reloaded"), or as the illogical extension of an already terrible movie (see: Brando acting with an ice bucket on his head in "Island of Dr. Moreau").

When I came up with the topic, several scenes popped into my head immediately. Among them, we have the transformation scene from "Revenge of the Sith" (all together now: "Nooooooooooooooooo!"), Nick Nolte revealing his transvestism in "Breakfast of Champions", anything involving Robert Forster on a horse in "Reflections in a Golden Eye", the diner scene from "Northfork", Jim Carrey as a 1950's screenwriter repudiating the House Un-American Activities Commission in "The Majestic" (then learning that he accidentally mentioned the name of a suspected Communist in his speech, thus letting him off the hook anyway), the endless, pointless drunk scene in "Wings", a host of fine candidates from "Pearl Harbor", and the entire last 75 mintues of "The Terminal".

Then there is the scene in "Armageddon" in which William Fichtner, an actor so dangerously terrible he should be tranquilized and tagged before being released back into the wild, eulogizes Bruce Willis to Liv Tyler thusly:

"I just wanted (pause) to shake the hand (epic pause) of the daughter ("Lawrence of Arabia"-esque epic pause) of the bravest man (47-minute pause) I've ever met."

All great choices, but all of them incorrect. The worst scene in the history of the cinema is........Angelina Jolie drunk-singing "Satisfaction" with striking transit workers in the resistible rom-com "Life or Something Like It"!!! Allow me to explain this scene in excruciating detail:

Jolie, utterly desirable even in a bleach-blonde bouffant, plays a self-absorbed Seattle newscaster whose perfect life is upended by a street-mystic's prediction of death and the arrival of Ed Burns, a scruffy cameraman who scorns Jolie's lifestyle even though he is clearly Ed Burns. In a moment of desperation, Jolie gets drunk and moseys downtown to cover a transit worker's strike that has completely snarled traffic throughout the city. She is allowed on camera despite her obvious inebriation, and interviews the union leader who claims to be dissatisfied with the city. This inspires Jolie to sing some snatches of the Rolling Stones hit...which gets the transit workers singing and dancing along....which gets the cameramen going too (because who can resist boogying to an unaccompanied karaoke version of a song when barely anyone can stomach the band version of anymore?)...which gets the cops' toes tapping as well...which gets the folks in the broadcast booth dancing...which finally brings even the stuck-up news producer to dance, until finally the entire city of Seattle has erupted into an impromptu "Satisfaction" singalong.

Manipulative even for a film based on a premise of flimsy artifice, nauseating to the point of an allergic reaction, performed with all the enthusiasm of a pallbearer, this scene takes the concept of bad scenes to a level it has not equalled since. Even better, in the film Jolie is lionized for her drunken performance -- the entire country eats it up! -- and she wins the national news media position she had been gunning for. Her first interviewee is her Barbara Walters-esque idol played by Stockard Channing (although why a drunken street singalong makes Jolie qualified for a sedate studio interview show is beyond comprehension), and after several minutes of dead air, Jolie drops an unexpectedly personal question that causes Channing to cry on tape. Somehow, this is considered a triumph for Jolie's character, who gives up her dream job and promptly moves back to Seattle. Hey look, I just saved you the trouble of watching "Life Or Something Like It"!

But where's my parade?

Movie # 206:

With his blonde Prince Valiant haircut, soft features, and whiny, insistent voice, Timmy Treadwell, the hero of Werner Herzog's documentary "Grizzly Man", resembles an overgrown surfer boy. Yet this man was able to spend 13 summers filming and living among packs of wild grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness, until he was finally killed and eaten by one of the creatures he loved so dearly.

Most of the footage in "Grizzly Man" comes from footage shot by Treadwell himself (over 100 hours worth), so Herzog is essentially shepherding this existing footage to the screen and arranging it into a treatise on our unique views of the natural world. However, anyone who has seen enough Herzog (who also narrates in his strangely soothing froggy Teutonic tone) knows how appropriate he is to oversee a story about a man who chases his obsession into the wilderness to the brink of madness and is eventually destroyed by it. Indeed, Treadwell is every bit the cracked visionary that Fitzcarraldo is, and as much of an outsider trying to make sense of a strange society as Kasper Hauser.

As we see shots of Timmy befriending foxes and practicing social rituals with the grizzlies -- whose natural ferocity is displayed in an extended violent struggle between two bears that ends in excretion -- we realize how much he wanted to think of himself as a bear, and how delusional his view of nature became. In Timmy's eyes, the natural world was unquestionably beautiful and pure, and the human world -- which he increasingly considered himself separate from -- was rotten to the core.

One of Herzog's interesting tendencies as a filmmaker is to introduce elements of artifice into his documentaries, while incorporating documentary elements into his fiction films (e.g., the torturous jungle shoots of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre). Several of the onscreen interviews, including a bizarre explanation from the coroner, are obviously shot from scripted remarks. I liked Herzog's use of artifice in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, in which the Vietnam POW Dieter Dengler acts out his own capture and prison experience, but it felt invasive and unnecessary in Grizzly Man. Treadwell's footage speaks for itself.

We see Timmy playing games with baby foxes, bathing with the bears, rhapsodizing over their excrement, proclaiming his love for them so stridently that it seems almost defensive. We see him creating a character out of himself, decrying his trouble with women, and interacting with the grizzlies with such ease and regularity that it seems impossible it took thirteen years for him to get devoured.

Herzog uses Treadwell's footage beautifully, and allows the audience to make up their own minds about this complicated character. It is a testament to Herzog that one is simultaneously fascinated and irritated by Treadwell, held in awe one moment and contempt the next.

So who was Treadwell anyway? Was he an admirable visionary? An eco-nut so alienated and hurt by humanity that he rejected his own (indeed, Treadwell appears to have been killed mainly because he stayed too long one summer, encountering mangier, late-season scavenger bears)? An ex-surfer seeking the ultimate extreme thrill (at one point, he claims it's his "edge" that keeps him safe among the bears)? Guardian of an endangered species (he claims he is there to protect the bears, but the only time we see poachers he is hiding in the brush)?

Everyone interviewed in Grizzly Man has their opinions -- his friends, his family, his co-workers, his detractors, Herzog, and even his coroner -- but you may leave the theater more conflicted than you might expect.

Grade: B+

P.S.: A topic to think of for later in the day -- the Worst Scene in Any Movie Ever.

Movie # 205: "Bunny Lake is Missing" is a brilliant film from Otto Preminger. It was made in 1965, and is the last film he made before studio interference and health problems supposedly caused a significant decline in his work, so it has the eerie quality of being a final movie, even though Preminger continued making films into the late 1970's. It also makes a nice companion piece to his first American success, "Laura", which was also about a mystery that may not be real.

"Bunny Lake" is actually quite similar to a couple of recent releases, "The Forgotten" with Julianne Moore and the upcoming "Flightplan" with Jodie Foster. In all three films, a mother loses her child, and authorities come to wonder whether the child ever existed. In this case, Carol Lynley is an American transport living in London, whose daughter goes missing on the first day of school. Keir Dullea (from "2001") plays her brother, who seems a little too close for comfort.

The film features the usual generous widescreen photography, impeccable framing, and swooning tracking shots that were hallmarks of the latter half of Preminger's filmography. Lynley and Dullea are a bit bland in the leads, but Preminger gets a lot out of them, and uses their blankness well by pasting it against a board of bizarre British behavior from some great actors -- Laurence Olivier is charmingly natural as the doubting inspector. The film is full of interesting insights into the hostility that underlines British civility, and the link between adult insanity and the fantasies of children.

Best of all is Noel Coward -- playing a character similar to Clifton Webb's in "Laura", as a poet/fetishist who gets to deliver such droll, perverse lines as "There are those at the BBC who bear like medals bruises left by the love of Horatio Wilson."

The last 15 minutes are a genuine descent into madness, instead of the usual car chase and fistfight. There are some genuinely creepy moments as well, including a grotesque scene in a doll hospital. Check this one out if you get the chance.

Grade: A-

Next up: My review of "Grizzly Man"

For those unfamiliar with me, Daniel Barnes, you should know that I watch a lot of movies. A lot of movies. I have seen exactly 204 in this calendar year alone, which puts me squarely on pace for 300 this year. In the year 2002, I challenged myself to watch 365 films in a year, and ended up sitting through 370. But that DB was a fat, lazy, boring schlub...this DB, only almost as much. I keep all of my movie entries in a notebook, recording what I saw, the director, a letter grade, how many times I've seen the film, the format, and who I saw it with. While it would be a waste of time to write out the entire list, I can at least get you up to speed for the month of August, admittedly a busy viewing month.

-The Wedding Crashers: B-
-Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman): A-
-Caddyshack: A-
-Nine Queens: A-
-Lola Montes: A
-The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli): A-
-Too Hot to Handle (w/ Jayne Mansfield): B
-Bread and Roses: B-
-Mikey and Nicky: B+
-The Stratton Story: B
-Alibi Ike (W/Joe E. Brown): B-
-Charley Varrick: B+
-I'm All Right Jack (W/Peter Sellers): B+
-D.E.B.S.: C- (the film is, however, a big bowl of ass soup)
-Stealth: C
-Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak): B
-Kiss Them For Me (Cary Grant and Jayne Mansfield again): C+
-The 40 Year-Old Virgin: B+
-The Beguiled: A-
-Fingers: B-
-The Wrong Man: B+
-One From the Heart: A
-The Emerald Forest: B+
-The Wizard of Oz: A
-The Brown Bunny: D
-Manhattan Murder Mystery: B
-The Gambler (w/James Caan, brilliant...I would even call him a "Caan artist"): B+
-Hard Times (w/ Bronson and Coburn): B
-The Brothers Grimm: C+

So there you are...some pretty good titles (especially the grandiose "Lola Montes", Minnelli's interior design psychology in "The Cobweb", Forman's brilliant touch with social awkwardness and humane details in "Loves of a Blonde", and the 2 Don Siegel titles, the kinky "Beguiled" and the Peckinpah-lite "Charley Varrick") and some disappointment (especially "Fingers" and "The Brothers Grimm"), as well as 1 genuine abomination ("Galllllloooooooooo Hooooooouuuusssse!!!!!!!!!!").

From here on, I will give you daily updates on my film viewings, which should at least keep me off the streets and out of the sun.

Incidentally, "Kings Talk" used to be the name of a weekly column I wrote for CitySearch many years back. That's right, ol' DB used to be a working writer (although never very hard or often), and now he is reduced to giving it away on the street like a common blog-whore. Oh, how the never-very-mighty have fallen just a little bit....

Apparently, some folks at ESPN have proclaimed the Kings as a lock to win the Pacific Division and even to challenge for a title. As much as I would like to believe it, this seems quite farfetched to me (though I can see how the Kings, with their younger, newer players might be considered something of a sexy pick at this point). Besides the obvious wall of talent that the defending champion Spurs are erecting (essentially the same team as last year, but with Nick Van Exel and Michael Finley coming off the bench), I think the Suns will fairly dominate the division once again. The Kings will get their 50 wins and a playoff berth, but I feel Phoenix will be even better this year. Joe Johnson and Quentin Richardson are gone, but with Brian Grant and Kurt Thomas staying at home on the block, Amare Stoudemire will be free to wreak havoc all over the place--Amare is my preseason MVP pick. The Suns have lost some firepower, but with Grant, Thomas, and Raja Bell on board, they will be able to play both ends of the floor this year, and they still have 3 players -- Nash, Amare, and Marion -- who are better than any single player on the Kings. Add to that the fact that we still don't have anyone who will be able to contain the likes of Chris Kaman or Jerome James or Joel Przybilla or any other the other flatfooted clods who routinely put up career numbers against the Kings, much less Amare Stoudemire, and you have the usual 50-win season and early playoff exit for the boys from Sac-town.

Apparently, the American Red Cross is donating all of the money they raise to victims relief instead of taking their usual percentage, so if you have any spare money, you should go to www.redcross.org and donate. DP told me that the horrors of Katrina feel a lot like the End Times, and even if that is a bit extreme (though, as DP points out, we do have an army in Babylon), I'm sure that all the people who are living through right now would be hard-pressed to argue the point. And to boot, our federal government has done practically nothing up to this point but defend themselves. If nothing else, this should point out the psychotic folly of using National Guardsmen to protect Fallujah and Baghdad instead of their own nation (over 3000 National Guardsmen from Mississippi and Lousiana are serving in the Middle East right now). Even if you think this war is a just and righteous cause...hell, even if the war is just and righteous and Saddam had weapons and aided the 9/11 attacks, it makes no sense. It's like asking your pitcher to play third base in the World Series...it hurts you on both offense and defense and makes no fucking sense!!

No movies again yesterday...I sang karaoke with Darcey and her friend. I did "I'm On Fire", which is the perfect karaoke song because 1) it's great; 2) it's short; 3) it has only 1 brief instrumental break; 4) it's fairly easy to sing, and if you have a deep voice like me, you can essentially talk-sing your way through it. It seemed to go over well with the crowd.

I'll post something about movies this afternoon. I might go see "Grizzly Man" tonight or tomorrow morning, so I will let you know.

There is a feature on Netflix called Local Favorites, that lists movies that are being disproportionately rented by folks from your town. Now Sacramento, I don't want to get bossy...but I never seem to see "To Have and Have Not" or "Blue Collar" or the original "Manchurian Candidate" on this list. Here are the top 10 films that Sacramento rents more than the rest of the nation:

1) Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry
2) Pushing Tin
3) Ballykissangel: Series 2
4) Ballykissangel: Series 1
5) Narc
6) 61*
7) The Brothers
8) The Secret of NIMH
9) Orgazmo
10) Birthday Girl

Wow...way to run the gamut from mediocre to terrible, Sacramento. Well, at least "Nuns on the Run", which occupied the #1 spot for what seemed like months, has finally been knocked out of the top 25. The Secret of NIMH and 61 are the only decent titles there...I was amused by Birthday Girl, but I've come to realize that Nicole Kidman has the ability to cast bonerific spells over me that leave me helpless for objective criticism. A couple of good titles show up farther down the list (Adam's Rib at 12, Dead Man Walking at 19), but for the most part this is a sorry lot. Let's give it another shot, Sacramento, what do you say?

It's early yet, but 2005 is making a strong case for itself as the worst year for films in recent memory. Granted, I have not been particularly active this year in comparison to years past (only 35 films thus far), but I have seen only 1 film this year that even approaches must-see status ("Hustle and Flow", and even that film was compromised by its slightly too-rosy depiction of Southern pimpery), and the landscape is littered with over-hyped and over-praised disappointments, as well as an endless parade of remakes, sequels, TV reruns, and generally derivitive (sp.?) trash. Maybe you folks can enlighten me to some gems I may have missed.

Here is a list of my top 5 films of 2005 thus far:
1) Hustle and Flow
2) The 40 Year-Old Virgin
3) Mad Hot Ballroom
4) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
5) March of the Penguins.

That has to be the most pathetic top 5 of all time...after the first 2 you can pretty much take it or leave it. Now the worst 5:

1) The Longest Yard
2) Be Cool
3) The Island
4) Cinderella Man
5) Star Wars: Episode 3

Granted, Episode 3 is the most hateful and inept of the bunch, but I have to admit that the new trilogy has brought me much ancillary delight and laughter amongst friends. But look at that bunch and there is everything you need to know about 2005. 2 sequels, 1 direct remake, and 2 indirect remakes (Cinderella Man of Raging Bull, which it shamelessly rips off in the opening shot of the film, and Rocky; The Island of Logan's Run, The Matrix, Minority Report, and really every sci-fi action film ever made. In fact, The Island has been sued because of its too-close resemblance to an obscure 1970's sci-fi film. I will look up this film and repost with the details). These films are nothing but safe bets, name brands, and tie-ins -- with movie budgets growing prohibitively large (industry standard for a successful film is one that earns three times its profits -- which means that if your film costs over 100 million, as "Stealth" did, you would have to have a legitimate blockbuster and cultural touchstone at 300 million just to break even) that no one will take a chance. Even "Batman Begins" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", which took some risks in tone and design, eventually succumb to sedate over-familiarity.

Has anyone out there seen anything else that belongs in the Bottom 5?

No time for blogging this morning, but I didn't see any movies last night. Just 5 episodes of Season 4 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Brilliant show, like recasting "Seinfeld" with an unattractive, self-described "avuncular bald Jew". However, the show seems a little rote at this point, despite throwing in a lot of brilliant plot threads, including Larry getting cast as Bialystock in "The Producers" on Broadway. In addition, besides the usual star cameos, there are a lot of great old character actors who show up, including Philip Baker Hall, Saul Rubinek, Paul Mazursky, and even the great Super Dave Osborne delivers some initimable deadpan line readings.