Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011, #38-34

38:  THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978) accomplishes something that very few genre horror movies are capable of: it will, no kidding, frighten, disturb, and haunt you. Made on a tiny budget, THE TOOLBOX MURDERS is a very violent, even a shocking movie, an exploitation movie that is, at times, clearly intended to be offensive. THE TOOLBOX MURDERS is also, unlike most such movies, thoughtful and thought-provoking; it's so carefully written and directed and acted, that it is consistently absorbing cinema, despite its technical and budgetary limitations. The first twenty minutes portray a masked killer, carrying a toolbox, attacking several pretty girls, in various states of undress, in multiple apartments, in the same seedy building, one after another, in real time. It's the slasher classic equivalent of the first half-hour of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a cinematic experience so grueling I must admit it made me shut THE TOOLBOX MURDERS off, the first time I tried to watch it. But I found myself unable to shake off and forget that opening sequence, and after several months of thinking about it, I eventually realized that what had upset me into shutting the movie off, was how genuinely harrowingly effective it was. So lengthy consideration drew me back to THE TOOLBOX MURDERS, and I found, to my surprise, that following the unforgettable graphic carnage of its opening sequence, THE TOOLBOX MURDERS switches gears. The remainder of the movie is tense, character-driven drama, as well as traditional genre murder mystery; the rich complex script also explores criminal psychology extensively by way of dialogue, rather than more excessive violence, though the movie never ceases to be deeply disturbing and discomfiting. Only its first half-hour is calculated to satisfy "horror" fans, but any audience that appreciates heavy serious drama, will enjoy THE TOOLBOX MURDERS more than they would expect.

37:  EYE OF THE DEVIL (1966) is a stylish, intelligent "castle Gothic," directed by J. Lee (CAPE FEAR) Thompson, starring David Niven, Donald Pleasance, and an extraordinarily beautiful young actress by the name of Sharon Tate, whose promise is, in this movie, heartbreakingly apparent. (You can almost feel Roman Polanski falling in love, while you watch it.) In EYE OF THE DEVIL a woman who's married a scion of an ancient family, finds that some kind of mysterious cult, which holds sway over the entire village, also somehow controls her husband, and expects some horrible sacrifice of him. I don't actually know whether anyone but me ever uses the phrase Castle Gothic, but what I mean by it, is, any low-budget genre production which uses a rented European castle for its primary location. The market for Castle Gothics was entirely glutted between 1960 and 1975; the Corman Poe "cycle," and the British Hammer gothics, are only the most famous among hundreds of movies, many of which tell stories a lot like this one does; and though I can't be sure, I suspect that the main reason EYE OF THE DEVIL has been largely forgotten, is, there were so many movies made, so much like this one, that serious movies geeks had trouble remembering it as distinct from so many similar pictures, playing across the next decade. Perhaps the fact that EYE OF THE DEVIL is just old enough to lack graphic sex and violence, has something to do with it. In any case, it's been forgotten unjustly: EYE OF THE DEVIL has an intelligent script and a great cast; gorgeous widescreen black-and-white photography, and beautiful locations, are backed up by careful attention to visual detail in every department; EYE OF THE DEVIL may be severely lacking in originality, but it's an eerie, atmospheric, and technically accomplished movie, that is, if this happens to be the kind of thing you like, extremely enjoyable.

36:  THE UNSUSPECTED (1947) is an unjustly obscure murder mystery directed by Michael Curtiz, and while it’s not quite as good as his classics CASABLANCA and MILDRED PIERCE, it’s close enough to bear comparison without wilting. Like those much more famous Curtiz classics, THE UNSUSPECTED is a quietly dazzling exercise in technical perfection; if there’s anything to complain of, it is that THE UNSUSPECTED is so carefully calculated, its every bit of available narrative space is crowded so conscientiously, that there is, somehow, no room left to convince us to care much about any of its many morally ambiguous characters. THE UNSUSPECTED is a lot like LAURA, but maybe actually smarter and more complicated than LAURA, and if that sounds like maybe THE UNSUSPECTED is a little too smart and too complicated for its own good, that may be more reasons why it’s so unjustly obscure. Claude Rains plays a professionally creepy radio writer and announcer, whose hit show consists of live readings of true crime stories; the extraordinarily detailed plot, involving several murders, is driven by several ways the many characters trick one another and the audience into believing untruths, some of which trickery takes advantage of then-futuristic recording equipment kept in the antagonist’s soundproofed home office. This is as classy as studio era Hollywood murder mysteries get, and deserves wide rediscovering.

35:  TRADER HORN (1931), a semi-documentary epic about African exploration, is a timeless classic, one of the greatest jungle adventure movies ever made; it's the cinematic grandfather of all Tarzan movies, of all "mondo" movies, of Werner Herzog's jungle adventure classics, and that's just off the top of my head. But you don't have to keep reminding yourself of all this historical significance, to help you sit through TRADER HORN, because if you have any taste at all for movies this old, or for jungle adventure pictures, TRADER HORN will consistently stun and awe you, from beginning to end. TRADER HORN sure works hard to make itself unwelcome, by contemporary standards, by way of raging political incorrectness: its attitude about race is pretty rough sometimes, and there's really no excuse for some of the animal cruelty onscreen (some of it was captured on the fly in the wild, but some of it was, infamously, staged, by starving Mexican zoo animals into attacking each other). Nevertheless TRADER HORN is a staggering achievement: the production shot on location, deep in the jungle, under such stressful conditions that some of the cast and crew became seriously ill (lawsuits ensued, and the beautiful intense starlet Edwina Booth never totally recovered). (This, by the way, landed on my plate via the Oscar excavations project: it was nominated for Best Picture.)

34: NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (1975) is a very Gothic Spanish zombie movie, which I wrote about at length, about nine months ago, when I first began this three-year list thing I'm doing, here. If you back out and scroll down, you can read what I said, then. (If you notice that this movie is now ranked ahead of several other titles, when it was second-to-last on the original list, the explanation for this, is that during the last nine months, I saw several of these movies, a third time. NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is the kind of movie you like even more the third time you see it, than you did, the second time, which you probably know, if you're a serious enough movie geek to enjoy reading this blog, is extraordinarily high and rare praise, for any movie.)

The Best Movies I saw 2009-2011, Belatedly Continued

I hope my readers will accept my apologies, for disappearing from this space for almost nine months, without even bothering to drop by to post an explanation. The explanation is, of course, that I've been busy and distracted. 2011 has been an exciting year for me.

Easily the most interesting of the many distractions that have kept me away from this blog, for the better part of the year, was, spending several months preparing to do a serious piece of screen acting, in a show that started shooting in October. Words cannot express how deeply honored I am to be appearing in the new James VanBebber movie GATOR GREEN. Anyone who's talked with me about movies, any time in the last several years, knows that Jim is one of my heroes, because I can't discuss the current state of the art, without asserting my opinion that James VanBebber's second feature THE MANSON FAMILY is the best underground/regional movie ever made. I've been one of the many fans eagerly awaiting Jim's next project, and I could not be more proud of being the right man, in the right place, at the right time, to become a part of that project, as a cast member. I could not be more thankful for the opportunity to work with Jim, as an actor; Jim's writing a hell of a character for me to play, and though, as of this writing, I haven't yet seen the stuff we shot in October, I hear I did good.

I guess I should say, before abandoning the subject, that although I'm closely involved with GATOR GREEN, this blog will not become the best place to watch for news, as GATOR GREEN slouches toward completion, nor will it be the first original source for information about any other movies I may happen to take up helping to make. I'm not particularly interested in blogging about my work as a filmmaker, while I'm doing it; if I do, somehow, become more interested, I'll take that up on another blog, somewhere, one that does not yet exist. Though I may mention GATOR GREEN, or other cinematic works-in-progress, in this space, this space exists for me to play the movie critic, in it, and I cannot imagine that I'll cease to try hard to keep this space focused on that writerly "mission." There are, I'm sure, already better pages to keep an eye on, to keep track of Jim VanBebber's progress, than this one, and most likely, there always will be.

(By the way: I'm not now, nor have I ever yet been, posting images or links, on this blog, because I'm too paranoid about the shifting state of the law, pertaining to the posting of borrowed images or links to other pages, to indulge myself, at all. But if anyone reading this wants to go ahead and append relevant links, in the comments section, I think that for now, I can convince myself to pretend that I believe I'm not legally responsible for that "content.")

Because I now have something like two to four weeks, in which to close the subject of The Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011, I'm going to tighten up the (remaining) list, to 39 titles (that's 13 per year, which is how I was doing it before 2009, anyway - I chose 13 movies a year, rather than the traditional 10, because 10 seems to me to be, in this context, an arbitrary number, and 13 is another arbitrary number, pretty close by, that I happen to like better). I'm also going to try to restrain the wordage per title, to some smaller number than what I was blowing on each movie, back in February and March, but, you know, on the subject of limiting word counts, given that I'm the only editor around here, I hesitate to commit myself. I will try to remain committed to blogging at least once a week, and hope I can get through this list in time to "do" a 2012 list about when all the other movie critics do their 2012 "best of" lists. (Don't laugh. I really will try.)

Okay, so here they are, now, clearly ranked and numbered - the 39 BEST MOVIES I SAW, 2009 TO 2011:

39:  TARKA THE OTTER (1979) is a remarkably beautiful wildlife movie as narrative drama, that ought to be more widely known and seen. But TARKA THE OTTER has been almost completely forgotten, because while it carries itself, for the most part, like a "family" movie, TARKA sells its BAMBIesque anti-hunting theme, in part, by using imagery so gruesme, that most American parents would be loathe to share it with anyone's children. Hell, this material will disturb most adults: picture, if you will, if BAMBI had been a live action movie, shot like a documentary, using wild and trained animals as actors - this is, in fact, a pretty good thumbnail description of TARKA THE OTTER (which, like BAMBI, is based on a minor literary classic). Now imagine that this "live action BAMBI" includes, not just a frightening hunt sequence that ends with the title character's mother dead, but also, that the sequence includes several lingering shots of the mother's corpse, hanging by its feet, dripping blood, while dramatic music plays, and the animal "lead actor" looks on, whimpering in horror. Now you have an accurate, unexaggerated idea, of where TARKA THE OTTER dares to go. (Seriously - I'm not kidding. Go check out the IMDb users' comments on TARKA THE OTTER; you'll find that most of their authors are there, mostly to express shock and outrage over the portrayal of Tarka's mother's death.) This is not to say that this content is in what I'd say is, generally speaking, bad taste; if you appreciate animal stories, that do not refrain from portraying violence in a straightforward naturalistic fashion, I strongly recommend that you seek out TARKA THE OTTER, as it is the live action close cousin to the animated classics WATERSHIP DOWN and THE PLAGUE DOGS (with which it would make a terrific, if somewhat depressing, double feature).  Also, if you're really impressed by movies that use a clever combination of training and trickery to turn various animals into creditable "stars" for use in structured narrative storytelling, you really need to see TARKA THE OTTER; I've never seen another movie of this type, deploy more animals as cast members, counted as individuals or as species, in a narrative so formally complex. It rivals or outshines every established classic in this area, including THE BEAR, which tends to ne the acknowledged masterpiece among fans of animal "acting," (when I can find them, outside my own family, which doesn't happen often).

Okay: I intend to take up this subject, in this space, with #38, in about a week. Wish me luck...!

Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011: NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS

First, before I get into recommending the Spanish horror classic NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS:

I've realised, since last I entried this blog, that it behooves me, as a movie critic publishing without any editorial oversight or restraint, to explain how I treat and deal with "SPOILERS!" I understand that a lot of movie geeks who use the Internet to research movies, a lot of the people, that is to say, I expect to read this blog, someday, are deeply concerned with having movies' stories blown for them, by casually exposive (sic) reviews, posted or published by writers who don't know or don't care that in ignoring this issue, they're doing real harm, in however limited a way. For instance, writer/director James Gunn probably didn't think the real harm was so limited, when it was his movie SUPER, a movie that depends in part upon an unexpected plot twist for its positive effect on any audience, being spoiled by Roger Ebert, who may be the most widely read movie critic on the planet; Ebert not only spoiled that twist in his review, but did so flippantly, in the course of writing a largely negative review. There wasn't much James could do about it, except complain on his Facebook page, and that's why this SPOILERS! issue really pisses people off: once the harm is done, it's done, and there's no way to undo it; there's no way to restore a story's element of surprise to a reader and/or viewer.

So here's the deal, with me, and SPOILERS! This is the deal you'll always get from me, as a writer, in this matter.

I can be, at times, brutally careless about disclosing details of plot, but only in discussing movies I've carefully judged to have no chance of surprising anyone, by way of anything scripted; I may be careless in disclosing story points, but only when I'm discussing movies that clearly don't depend, in any way, on keeping those story points hidden, for their effect. Most movies don't set out to offer plot-related surprises, for anyone over the age of twelve; it's almost universal, in fact, that screenwriting is thin in exactly this sense, and that includes the scripts for a lot of movies worth writing about. A lot of filmmakers believe that writing should be thin on story, in this exact sense; in fact, this is one of the major ways in which big studio Hollywood, collectively, is falling way, way behind these times, and today's audiences, and their expectations... but that's a subject far beyond the scope of this blog entry.

Back to the subject of SPOILERS! and this blog. There are, of course, a lot of movies that are story driven in ways that require reviewers to exercise care, regarding what they reveal, in writing about them. Don't worry: being a studious movie geek, and having been a professional Hollywood screenwriter, myself, I have an intimate working knowledge, of what kinds of stories, in what kinds of movies, require this kind of care. I can't promise you that I won't give away story points, in discussing any specific movie; nor can I promise to let you know when I'm about to "SPOIL" something in such a way; but I do promise that I'll always show excellent judgment, about what kinds of details comprise storytelling "secrets," so that any movie I happen to discuss, remains as enjoyable as it can possibly be, for those of you who haven't seen it yet. I seriously promise to do better than Ebert; that is to say, as a movie critic, I will be respectful, and attentive, in this matter, when writing about any movies - even when I'm writing about movies that I don't like or care about at all.

Luckily, today I'm still exploring my three years' "best" list, so that last point doesn't apply, to present company. (But earlier points do apply; that is to say, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, for all its many and various strengths, does not have what you might call an unpredictable storyline...)

Another set of preliminary observations, to get out of the way, before recommending NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS: when circumstances require me to try to explain my lifelong obsessive fascination for old fashioned, Gothic-esque, Halloween-y horror cinema, I'm more or less at a complete loss. Why do castles, spooky organ music, beautiful women in period costume and/or nude with fangs added, colorful unjustified lighting and wildly excessive machine-generated fog... etcetera, etcetera... why do these most elementary elements of generic genre horror, hold such overwhelming, enduring appeal, for me, or for anyone? Why is it that this is the cinematic stuff for which some among us, myself included, live? I could work hard to explain it, but I know from experience that if I do so, I will, most likely, mostly fail. It's easier for me to simply say, that's just how it is, with me, and folks like me, and Gothic-toned "classic" horror movies; if you're one of the many, many other movie geeks out there, who don't quite agree with me, in terms of taste, in this matter, all I can really say, is, it's a shame you don't enjoy this stuff as much as I do.

If, however, you do agree with me, on this subject; if you are, like me, unhealthily entranced by just about anything one might accurately describe as Gothic horror, or classic horror, or old fashioned horror, this next movie on my three years' "best" list is not unlikely to excite you, too. If you're not so susceptible to such cinema, not yet, anyway, maybe a good way to start yourself in that direction, if that's what you think you really want to do, is the old fashioned Gothic 1975 classic known in the States as NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS.

Spanish director Amando de Ossorio has a pretty good reputation, among those horror and Eurosleaze cinema fans serious enough to know his name at all; most of the cult followings his movies have earned, have accrued to the several titles in his "blind dead" series. No, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is not the first of these slightly famous Spanish zombie movies, but I think it's easily the best. It certainly has the most appeal for those of you who are not among the aforementioned serious horror and Eurosleaze cinema fans; that is to say, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, as the strangeness of its title possibly implies, is, somewhat self-consciously, an "art film," or something a lot like one. I'd encourage anyone unfamiliar with these movies, to start with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (and if you like this one, backtrack to see the earlier series entries); and though my own personal tastes make it hard for me to say so, for sure, I suspect this movie is good enough to be a good place to start, for anyone who's enough of a neophyte, to lack all points of reference, for understanding what is meant by "nineteen seventies Eurosleaze horror cinema." (Of course, most of the best places to start, are among the better known Italian genre classics; but my best lists draw only on movies I myself saw for the first time, in any given year, and I saw most of that Italian stuff, for the first time, many, many years ago.)

There is no narrative connection among Amando de Ossorio's "blind dead" movies; they do not share characters, nor does any strand of story run through and connect them. What they do share, is their Knights Templar zombies, and even a glance at the stills available online will make it clear to you that these makeup creations may be the most frightful and memorable screen zombies in all horror cinema. These extremely slow-moving, ominously silent zombies, are dressed in Knights Templar costumes so weathered and tattered, you could almost believe their putative age; they're so thoroughly and effectively redolent of all things ancient and dead, that even those jaded horror geeks who find the "blind dead" movies too slow, quiet and restrained, all around, usually concede that their zombies, are, if nothing else, unforgettable.

NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS has an unusually tasteful script for a seventies European zombie movie; the desire on the part of the filmmakers, to give this movie a timeless, "classic" feeling, is almost palpable. A young doctor on his way to his first post, accompanied by his nervous wife, arrives in the tiny seaside fishing village that is to be their new home, to find they're not welcome and not wanted. The locals won't speak to them at all if they can help it, and won't even sell them groceries without telling them to leave town and mind their own business. The doctor being replaced flees without explaining the curse the town is under, beyond warning the new doctor that if he and his wife do stay, they must never go outside at night. Soon enough, the newcomers figure out that something strange is going on, something that causes the disappearances of young girls from the village, night after night - disappearances that are always preceded by the ominous clangor of churchbells, and the screech of weirdly nocturnal seagulls... and also, eerie slow-motion photography, of a troop of zombie cavalry, climbing from their graves, and riding out of their ruined castle, by moonlight...

The reason I mentioned the SPOILERS! business in this entry, is, of course, that this story is so thin, it's so old-fashioned, that it's hard to believe anything in it, is capable of "surprising" anyone. That being said, it's a tasteful, thoughtful script, that gives this movie all the excuse it needs, to pour on the style. The amazing locations clearly go back hundreds and hundreds of years; every shot in NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is crowded with decaying masonry of jawdropping age. The photography is astonishingly beautiful, dripping with opiated distortions, imagery often so fuzzy it's as textured as paint on canvas. Atmosphere and mood? NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is almost nothing but atmosphere and mood.

It's getting too late in the day, for me to fuss over giving this blog entry a rounded ending. I'll be blunt and brief: it's true it's a matter of peculiar personal taste, for me, with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, and my passionate recommendation of it; for those of you who are generally disinclined to see this kind of thing, I guess I wouldn't recommend it, so highly... but if you happen to have no set opinion of such things, as yet... if you happen to be Eurosleaze horror-curious, so to speak... NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is as good an introduction to the Spanish side of the field as you're likely to have easy access to.

The Best Movies I've Seen 2009-2011, Part 1: SHOOTER

It's true that the stated purpose of this blog is to comment upon, and recommend, movies that were nominated for Oscars, and I'd like to stick to that purpose, if not exclusively, then at least, you know, predominantly. It's also true that the last time I checked in here I began to write a lengthy, detailed reading list, to accompany the Oscar-related recommended viewing list I've already posted.

But the end of a calendar year recently rolled over and past us, and as I have no other venue in which to write about my favorite movies of the past year, I'll have to do it here. (Besides, I happen to know that that last entry I posted, enticed that reader who requested that reading list, into taking a shot at reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, so she ought to be occupied with that, for a while, and require no further recommendations, any time soon.) (Um, unless she has as much trouble getting into that book, as I did.)

I'm inordinately excited about this, because I haven't had a chance to write about my year's favorite movies, for three whole years, now, though I have been keeping lists. (I did get as far as posting lists of titles, without additional comment, on my Facebook page, at the end of 2009 and 2010; but the gravity of my medical condition, at both those times, prevented me from following up with any notes at all. While I do expect my friends to generally appreciate my taste in movies, I don't think I can rightly expect many or any of them, to go around watching titles from one of my eclectic lists, without any indications as to why they should, in any specific instance, in any particulars. I wouldn't, if I was them, or you, or anyone else.)

(What's that you say? I've already posted a long list of recommended Oscar titles, without saying a word about any of those? Um, right. Right, I need to catch up with writing some notes, here, about those movies, too...)

My year's end best lists are chosen from all the movies I personally happened to see for the first time, during that year. My health doesn't allow me to keep up with theatrical releases in such a way as to effectively cover the same "year's best" material that everyone else does, for any given year; and if I did, I'd probably name seven or eight of the same movies every other critic named, anyway. This blog is about recommending movies, in a truly useful way; so I'm recommending the best movies I happened to see between January 2009 and December 2011, regardless of when those movies happen to have been originally released. Certainly at least some of them will be "new," to you.

I, like many another serious movie geek, track a few generic "big Hollywood" directors, because I find them occasionally interesting. I was running way behind when, in 2009, I caught up with the 2007 Antoine Fuqua thriller SHOOTER. I went out of my way to see this slick and fashionable A-list Hollywood political thriller/action movie, because I track its director, Antoine Fuqua; I track Fuqua out of admiration for TRAINING DAY, a corrupt cop thriller starring Denzel Washington, that was so much better than that kind of movie usually turns out to be, it was almost an instant classic. SHOOTER wasn't a major hit of its season the way TRAINING DAY was, but it is almost as good, which means it's well worth seeing.

Adapted from Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact, SHOOTER tells the story of former USMC Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, played by Mark Wahlberg. A brilliant sniper, Swagger/Wahlberg gets disillusioned in the line of duty, and so becomes a bitter, paranoid recluse, living alone in a cabin in the woods, avidly tracking Internet conspiracy theories. A group of renegade Feds (led by Danny Glover, cast against type, here, as a creepy villain, with limited success) trick him into coming out of retirement to plan the assassination of a visiting African politician, for reasons and by means it would be unnecessarily spoiling to explain here in detail; Glover and his people plan to frame Wahlberg for the crime he never knew they intended to commit, and they also plan to kill him, too, immediately after the assassination, but Wahlberg, of course, turns out to be much more resourceful, dangerous, and vengeful than the people using him ever suspected. Wahlberg spends the rest of the intricately plotted movie eluding police and government agents, while figuring out who set him up and why, and then hunting them down, working his vengeful way up the crooked chain of command to the power behind Danny Glover, a sitting U.S. Senator (played with heavy accent and gruesome relish by Ned Beatty).

Leaving all its carefully crafted detail out of a description of SHOOTER, like I just did, makes it sound like cookie-cutter formula stuff; it's in those details, and in the careful attention paid them by the filmmakers, that SHOOTER really proves itself to be a movie too fiercely determined to entertain, to dismiss out of hand, out of disgust for its intermittent reliance on cliche. SHOOTER is richly scripted, heavily and artfully plotted, filled with interesting supporting characters and diverting minor incidents, given to carefully researched technical detail. Most importantly, SHOOTER, like TRAINING DAY, feels genuinely committed to its political message; in fact, it's essentially the same message, in both movies, and so it seems safe to attribute that message, and that sense of commitment, to their common director, Antoine Fuqua. What Fuqua seems to be determined to tell us, by unwieldy way of these his best big studio genre movies, is that power and money are intrisically corrupting influences, in any system that runs by or on power and/or money; and that the only hope for combating creeping corruption, be it among cops or among politicians, lies in good men of principle acting, when necessary, to exploit the decadence and weakness corruption always engenders, to destroy those who are so corrupted, even if and when that requires fighting violence with violence. Perhaps Antoine Fuqua sees himself and his work reflected in this message; that is to say, that Antoine Fuqua using his career as a big studio director, devoting his wit and skills to making shallow fun genre hits, to get this message across, is akin to the renegade heroics of his movies' protagonists.

That's pretty heavy talk, I know, for describing a pretty standard studio A-list action thriller, and that's the thing about SHOOTER; it may arrive as yesterday's news, in some respects, but even as it satisfies genre conventions on a mass market level, dealing in overly familiar storytelling terms and tropes, SHOOTER is also, undeniably, a smart and thoughtful movie, made for smart and thoughtful audiences, clearly intended to fuel meaningful conversations about politics and about society. SHOOTER is also irresistibly engaging, a fast paced, tightly controlled machine of a movie, carefully designed and engineered to entertain a large wide audience, in a serious intense way. In all of this, SHOOTER is, again, closely comparable to TRAINING DAY, and while I guess I'd recommend you see TRAINING DAY first, I enjoyed SHOOTER almost as much.

Reading List (that goes with the Watching List published above, or below)

(First of all, the autotype suggested I call this blog post "How do I get rid of a demon?" Which is, well, interesting, I must say. I can either feel creeped out about why the computer would just spontaneously make that offer; or just put it down to assuming that my wife Angie or my daughter Greta recently typed that title for a blog entry... and, you know, get creeped out about that, instead.)

(By the way, now that I've finished writing the entry that consisted mostly of typing a long list of movies, I'll revert to capitalizing all movie titles, which was standard stylebook for all the websites I wrote for, last time I was publishing anything. If anyone thinks capitalizing movie titles looks wrong for some reason, let me know.)

Another sort of parenthetical note: because I've just read over the list I typed over, I happened to notice that STARSHIP TROOPERS somehow vanished, at some point; I don't know how it disappeared - it was certainly supposed to be on the list, and I'll correct the other entry, as soon as I'm done typing and posting this one. It sure makes me nervous, knowing that every detail of any project I undertake, is entirely in the hands of one heavily medicated guy, who does things like accidentally deleting titles from his final recommended viewing list, without remembering how or when it happened... I suppose that means I ought to read over some master list of Oscar-nominated titles for every year, one more time, just to look for other slips of the typist's hand... then again, maybe I'll just set this matter of doublechecking the list of titles aside, for now, at least until I watch, I don't know, another thousand movies or so, from the rest of the list. Maybe two thousand. Maybe I'll just check when I think I'm done...

Okay, a reading list. Books the movies were based on. Here we go:

THE THIN MAN is that serendipitous rarity, a movie based on an excellent novel which faithfully translates the book to the screen, adding and embellishing only where it undeniably helps tell the story. THE THIN MAN was such a success as a movie, it spawned five (increasingly slight and silly) sequels; Dashiell Hammett never wrote a sequel to his novel, but the novel he wrote, is worth reading at least twice.

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is based on a notable book, one that's been filmed several times, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall; I haven't read this book, but it concerns true events, so maybe if the excellent 1935 movie inspires you to further reading on the subject, the Wikipedia page would be a good place to start.

I find unexpectedly that MY MAN GODFREY is actually based on a novel called 1101 Park Avenue, written by one Eric Hatch. Who knew? Not me. Mr. Hatch seems (from my present perspective - that of someone looking at his imdb page) otherwise most notable for having written the screenplay for the once-popular and sequelized romantic comedy/ghost story TOPPER, and another novel he wrote served as the basis for the Disney picture THE HORSE IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT. Again: who knew? Apparently he wrote 25 novels, but unless I'm mistaken, his work has gone way out of fashion; anyway, I've never heard of him.

Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is based on a story "written" by the well-known German folklorists collectively known as The Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were central figures in the German literature of their time; the lifetime of work they put into gathering, writing, and publishing the wild, rich, and previously entirely oral folklore of their country, is only their most prominent and enduring among many notable literary contributions. Here in the United States "the Brothers Grimm" are commonly misapprehended as authors of fairy tales for children; in fact, a lot of the folk tales they gathered, are not only too frightening for small children, but also, too deeply strange, for any adult who actually reads them to misunderstand as "children's literature" of any kind. A collection of their stories edited for an adult audience - many editions of the "complete Brothers Grimm fairy tales" are available; I believe I read Signet paperbacks - belongs in rare literary company - I would go so far as to say that it constitutes one of the great semi-inexplicable works of world literature, alongside The Bible, The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Mabinogion, and the Satyricon by Petronius (which will come up at length later on in this list, when I get to the Fellini movie based on it). I can't recommend reading Wilhelm & Jacob Grimm's "fairy tales" highly enough, and comparing their "Snow White" to Disney's movie is as good a place to start as any.

GONE WITH THE WIND is based on the Margaret Mitchell novel of the same title, a novel which remains a much-loved perennial cult classic, mostly, as far as I can tell, in the "deep South," among, you know, white people. Well, white women, actually. (Let's go ahead and call a spade a spade, if you know what I mean.) I tried to read it once, and found it, well, I hate to just pass on a superficial impression of the first twenty pages of a gigantic novel, twenty years after I read them, but that superficial impression was that Gone with the Wind, the novel, is badly marred by racist sentiments, many of them, variously expressed, throughout several levels of interpretation of the text... but then, I was only twenty, twenty years ago, and if my synchronicity-obsessed friend Andras were sitting here, he'd point out that the Motown song that happened to be playing, just now, while I wrote this paragraph (I bought the Motown box set for Angie for Christmas), mentioned, seemingly significantly, that "you can't judge a book by its cover," right, you know, when I was doing pretty much just that. I'm sure I know some folks who love this novel, and I would love it if you'd append a comment here, to defend it; I'm also sure that, whether or not the book was  intended to express or project racist ideas or attitudes, it's well worth reading, anyway, even so, just to compare it with a movie adaptation that very carefully and cleverly avoids being, itself, racist (or even commenting often or directly on the race-related matters that insistently prodded the historical events that GONE WITH THE WIND uses for backdrop). It's true that the enduring popularity of the novel, Gone with the Wind, is at least in part directly due to the enduring popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, the movie, arguably the crowning acheivement of Hollywood's studio era. It's also safe to say that if this novel were simply terrible, no one would be reading it still, and it remains a reliable seller, so... so judge for yourself, I guess.


I find that my reliable problem with chronic logorrhea, has put me in the position of promising to continue this "reading list" business, next time. If anyone does take up watching these movies in tandem with reading these books, let me know; perhaps we can make a club out of it. (No - seriously.)