Coffee! Gimme coffee! Black coffee! Lots of it!

Stagecoach

(1939)

We can argue about whether this is the best Western ever, but I doubt that you could name a more compact and efficient one, finding room in barely 90 minutes as it does for the hero-outlaw, the drunken doctor, the whore with a heart of gold, the soured but noble gambler, the Indian fight, and the climactic shootout. Clichés, you say? OK, if you will; I prefer to call them tropes, the necessary ingredients of a mythic mural.

The emperor . . .

Prêt-à-porter (Ready to wear)

(1995)

A movie I was ravenously eager to see, until it was released and the reviews appeared. It seems to have inspired belated appreciation since Altman's death, and I thought it was time to see whether it's really so terrible. Well, no, it's not terrible; it's just not very good. Altman's style is to walk a tightrope between creation and chaos, of course, so it's a miracle that he was ever able to pull it off. And there are moments of nasty brilliance here involving the conscienceless photographer played by Stephen Rea, but the marquee pairing of Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren is just painful to watch, and most of the other pairings are cliché catalogues. And what point is Altman trying to make about dog shit on the Paris sidewalks?

Nothing that I'd rather be

Levanon (Lebanon)

Crit

Wow, it's like a remake of Das Boot, only with Israeli soldiers in an even more claustrophobic (and wet) place, a tank. It's a world where your ostensible allies, a pair of Phalangists driving a Mercedes, can be lots scarier than the Syrians that you don't know what the hell they're doing in Lebanon anyway, and the closest thing to a kindness that can be mustered is helping your chained prisoner empty his bladder. Riveting and agendaless, unless impressing upon us that war isn't really much fun can be called an agenda.

Bran Nue Dae

Crit

By no stretch can this be called a good film, but its heart is enormous and in the right place, and you'd have to be a bigger Scrooge than I to resist it. The cast is a bunch of people Americans have never heard of . . . plus Oscar® winner Geoffrey Rush, glorying as a Teutonic priest without the restraint of anyone saying, "Maybe a little too broad that time, Geoff; wanna tone it down just a tad?" Everybody is having a blast on this one.

Top men

Raiders of the Lost Ark

(1981)

You know, of all the many times I've watched this before, I've never watched it just to see Nazis' heads explode, but if you see my previous post, you'll understand why I made an exception this time. (Yeah, yeah, I know: no Nazis' heads explode; a mercenary French collaborator's head explodes, and two Nazis' heads melt; close enough.)

True crime

A Film Unfinished

Crit

OK, I'm convinced: I'd been thinking Nazis had been getting kind of a bum rap all these years, but after absorbing this excruciating, brutal wallop to the solar plexus, I believe they really were right bastards. I mean, it's not enough you murder millions of people, but you treat film without the proper respect, too?

There are, I suppose, many possible criticisms of this film, not least of which the apparent surprise that documentarians can have agendas, and that evil documentarians might have evil agendas. But if after seeing all you see here you aren't so overwhelmed with revulsion by the images captured in the titular film that you suspend your critical faculties, you've a stronger stomach than I.

Nobody kills me until I say so

Mesrine: Part 1: Killer Instinct and Part 2: Public Enemy #1

Crit

How do I love this? Let me count the genres. Let's see, there's the innocent-young-soldier-who-sees-too-much-in-the-war-and-comes-out-wrecked-for-a-9-to-5-gig genre, there's the James Cagney-purposefully-crazy-gangster genre, there's the Gun Crazy/Bonnie and Clyde/crime-as-aphrodisiac genre, there's the you-endanger-my-family-while-coming-after-me? (cf. The Godfather: Part II) subgenre, there's the John Ford's-own-Monument Valley-Western genre, there's the prison-break genre (not to mention the broken-in-prison genre; geez, those Canadians maybe aren't as jolly and amiable as we've been led to believe!), there's the how-the-hell-is-the-superhero-getting-out-of-this-alive? genre--and that's all just in Part 1.

Vincent Cassel is appropriately steely/charming/scary as France's celebrity criminal Jacques Mesrine, a relentless shark who knows that he needs to keep moving forward or die.

Rock the Fenway

The Town

Crit

As I said after Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, he has the potential to direct a great film someday, but this is not yet the day. This is a strictly-by-the-numbers heist/buddy/love (which gets in the way of the buddies) story, which doesn't bear a moment's thought about key plot elements (uh, so the FBI stopped surveilling after getting the outlaws in their sights and right before their next heist why, exactly? . . . ), but the numbers are pretty good, and anything that lets us gaze at Rebecca Hall (or, for some, Jon Hamm) and Fenway Park has its undeniable merits.

Trailers

• Hereafter--Clint Eastwood directs Matt Damon in one of those interwoven touched-by-big events stories. 
• Fair Game--Naomi Watts in a sexed-up version of the Valerie Plame story.
• The Tourist--Jolie, Depp, Venice, bullets; 'nuff said.
• Life as We Know It--Death would be infinitely preferable.