Make no mistake: I am not a film fan.

There is something about the all-encompassing, marathon big screen format that strikes me as a singular waste of time unless it is providing a peerless dose of entertainment --especially when you factor in the wasted life unit of sitting through the pre-film ads showing paper sacks discussing the merits of pre-ordering movie tickets online, and runway models cavorting to whored out 60's megahits while they drench themselves in a downpour of C2 (half the carbs!).

Don't even get me started on the seven back-to-back previews for asinine summer comedies featuring road-tripping male adolescents ogling breasts (Americans have an utterly insatiable appetite for this sort of tripe, I have to conclude), and the clue-free families of eight who show up ten minutes past the start of the movie, and whose children walk past your seat 47 times to get bags of contraband snacks from mommy. Nonetheless, this summer, several movies have hit the local googleplex that contain some or most of the reasons I might be driven to actually see a film:

• It depicts a post-apocalyptic scenario.
• There is no depiction of people using disgusting needle-based drugs accompanied by scenes of sweating, vomiting, twitching, or drug lords, no graphic violence of any other variety, and no rapes. (Filmmakers who depict rapes make me want to borrow Hothead Paisan's baseball bat.)
• An actor I really like (this maybe numbers 3 actors) is in the film, and it doesn't break one of the other rules.
• It just has a sheen of indefinable awesomeness.
• It doesn't explicitly break other rules, and there is nothing else to do, and/or it is 95 degrees outside.
• It is a sequel to a movie I really liked, although sequels in of themselves are a questionable concept.

I was stunned to realize that I have sat in the refrigerated air of the googleplex no less than eight times this summer, sat through eight Fanta, Fandango, and C2 commercials, eight repetitions of Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man (Marty, you're a joker!!), eight times I have endured these torments on the promise of being entertained, and or, in come cases, avoiding a really hot weekend afternoon.  

Therefore I feel it is my obligation to regale you with tiny dog's summertime film retrospective, so that you might better inform your DVD rental choices in the cooling months to come.  

Before Sunset

The most immediate comment to make about this film is that it is rightly pitched to a very select and somewhat tiny portion of the filmgoing market who saw and liked Before Sunrise in, what was it, 1995, and who likes Linklater films in general. I fit this description. If you don't, you may not want to bother, although if you like low budget talky films about romance, you are still likely to appreciate it. If you are anyone else, please adjust my star rating way down, and move on to the next review.

Linklater himself readily calls Before Sunrise the lowest grossing film to spawn a sequel, and it is one of the only sequels you are ever likely to see that is made for love and not so much money, although I am curious to know how the film did in relation to its prequel.

On to the review. Before Sunrise effectively captured the experience of a rootless and intense college-age affair, complete with romantic European backdrop, slacker-rambling about destiny, and a devastatingly unanswered open ending. If you've had any sort of half-baked romance in your youth about which you still reminisce, it's the film for you.

It's safe to say not many of us anticipated that a sequel would ever exist, being that the open ending allowed one to effectively end the film for him or herself. And yet, nine years later, the main characters meet again in Paris, with greatly complicated situations that tend to form, dry-rotlike, as one enters their 30's and beyond. In short, the film manages to capture angst over real time --this is, literally, nine years in the future, for the actors as well-- and brings to life the reunion all of us likely imagine in our heads with that certain imploded romance from back in the day.  

All of this is done with an authentic emotional panache that is deadly scarce in films today-- the characters didn't seem like actors, at all.  

Anyway, I loved it.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

May I remark that I thought Being John Malcovich was one of the most gimmicky, winky-wink in-the-know film-school films I've ever seen, and utterly lacked a drop of human feeling. I just am not all that engaged by plain vanilla cleverness, I guess I went to college with too many liberal arts assholes who were all style and no substance, I don't know.  

However, Eternal Sunshine was that same film but with real emotions interjected, and what a gi-normous difference that makes. Aside from an occasional base note of Hollywood excess, this movie tells a deeply affecting story about the complex imperfections of loving someone, using the unique device of explaining what might happen if you attempted to extract a relationship from your memory. With this premise, the movie shows, in reverse, the scars that love leaves in your personal history, and how you would not be who you are without them.  

The emotions are real, the observations were dead-on, and the last lines left me --horrors!-- in tears.

Interestingly, I did not particularly appreciate Mark Ruffalo's performance in this film (you'll read more about him further down the chart). Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, on the other hand, were great.

Fahrenheit 9/11 and 1/2

Good, but definitely overhyped.  

For anyone who has seen other Michael Moore films, the prankish, low budget mischief and corny use of music and Hollywood imagery will not seem jarring, but for a neophyte who only knows this as a Palme d' Or winning stroke of genius, the filmmaking techniques, and narrative wandering will seem amateurish. I think people have mixed up the greatness of the message (which is damning, and very effective) with its delivery, which is somewhat unimpressive.

That said, it is a scathing rebuttal to the intense air strikes of right wing political bullshit that have rendered this country slack-jawed in the face of deadly, well-documented governmental corruption and a groundless, preemptive war resulting in the deaths of over 11,000 human beings. I rate highly because I hope it has the power to encourage average Americans to get their brains out of the spin cycle in time to potentially avoid voting for Bush in November.

Spiderman II

You know, it was pretty good for a superhero film, largely because there was an interesting backstory about ambivalence and failure, effectively depicted by the morose underdoggish Tobey MacGuire (who I thought could do no wrong until I rented the ham-fisted, boorish horse opera known as Seabiscuit).  

Casting some dim Val Kilmerish hunk in this role would have made this film a piece of one-note refuse. Instead, it deftly combined all of the big-budget Spidey hi-jinks you would expect with a nice sense of visual style and narrative substance. The perfect, inoffensive yet refreshingly smart summer blockbustery type film.

Napoleon Dynamite

One of those freak phenoms that becomes unreasonably popular, out of proportion to its merits and/or mass market appeal. I saw this film in a relatively packed major-release theater weeks after its release, a place in which it squarely did not belong, as evidenced by the restless children sitting on either side of me. Only thrift-clad, drawling college scenesters should ever view this film, in some off-brand 40-seat theater with a 10 foot screen.  

How do I know this? After seeing it, I read a number of reviews, and not a single reviewer got the film. They all compared it to Hollywood candy-machine misfit movies about high school rivalries and utterly failed to grasp that the entire point of the film was sort of an ode to the inherent ironic comedy in time-warped Idaho misfit culture.

Reviewers fixated on geek stereotypes and their own uncomfortable feelings about geekdom as an archetype, without really getting that this wasn't a film about commonly trafficked high school stereotypes, but rather, a sort of deadpan antihero story milking Midwestern anomie and weirdness for every possible laugh.  

I do not recommend this movie to people who are not basically weird and fixated with hipsterism. Eventually someone will explain how this movie reached the mass market in some sort of droll, "tipping point" style article on Slate.

Did I mention that I really rather liked it?  

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and 1/2 or maybe possibly 3 stars but maybe not

Well, I guess it was really good and stuff except that I don't remember much about it. There was a stunningly good animation of a hippogriff that looked just like a real animal, and another stunningly bad animation of a drooling werewolf that looked herky and pixelized. What is it with Hollywood and wolves?  

Anyway, as the Harry Potter series has progressed --and I have read every book in full-- the plot machinations around Voldemort and his posse of evil have become more convoluted, shady, and hard to follow than the Bush administration. Harry Potter III, in keeping with this ever growing complexity, threw down some greatly compressed plot details around Voldemort's henchmen doubling as pet rats and prison escapees, and I had a frankly hard time following what was going on at times, since Harry Potter leans hard on explaining the backstory of evil in flagrant violation of the oft-repeated creative writing class advice to simply show it.

This film had a fresh look and feel to it due to its new director, and threw out some of the repetitive focus on the goings-on at the woefully disruptive and unsafe Hogwart's school, all very good and necessary things, in my opinion. However, Malfoy was strangely emasculated in this film, for no reason I could discern, allowing Hermione to bitch slap him with nary a protest. What was that about?

13 Going on 30

Utterly pedestrian Hollywood fare, which I saw only to appreciate the shuffling, rumple-haired appeal of Mark Ruffalo, most gorgeous actor ever to live. So I sat there eating my popcorn and muttering "Mmmm... Ruffalo..." and admiring his ill-fitting corduroy pants and doe-eyed looks and line mutterings for two hours, and it was worth six bucks for sure. He is a major league dreamboat.

Day After Tomorrow NO STARS

Oh, we've already discussed this film at length, and it wasn't pretty.

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