FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

While it’s never held the iconic status of GOLDFINGER/’64 (nor that film’s ultra-clean narrative line), the second James Bond pic anchored the series with most of the signature elements that continue to prop up the increasingly arthritic franchise. This early outing has an unusually strong cast with Sean Connery, still lithe & dangerous as Bond, playing hardball with Robert Shaw (an actual actor as the menacing goon), and footsies with the gloriously eccentric baddie Lotte Lenya. A good thing, too, because Bond’s romance with Soviet spy Daniela Bianchi never heats up. The first half of the film plays out as a picturesque vamp (in photogenic Istanbul) before turning into a picaresque chase, a bit too closely modeled on Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59. (A ‘Making-Of’ short details some of the plot contortions.) GOLDFINGER took things one step farther away from a realistic spy yarn (for better & for worse) and even managed to set Connery up with an age-appropriate love-interest. After that it was all bloat, gadgets & self-mockery. Recent entries have kept up-to-date with ultra-violence & buckets of CGI. Whoopee.

A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)

Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? No. Steven Spielberg took up a story idea that had apparently caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick at his most misanthropic. But if Kubrick’s films grew ever more loathsome after he entered his English hermitage, Spielberg one ups the master with a film that is both loathsome and idiotic. It’s basically a futuristic variation on PINOCCHIO/’40, something of an idée fixe for Spielberg who even had composer John Williams put a slice of ‘Wish Upon A Star’ into CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/’77, the only other film where he claimed sole script credit. In A.I., the kid is no puppet, but a super-realistic automaton, tossed into a real-life family where his creepy overdose of loving devotion isn’t able to handle actual human complications. Fine, well and dandy. What makes it all revolting, and typically Kubrickian, is that this mechanized loyalty is presented as something better than the flawed human variety. Kubrick, at his long-lost best (he went ‘round-the-bend toward the end of 2001/’68), would have revealed (and reveled) the black humor in how humankind undervalues this simulacrum; Spielberg takes it all at face value. The little known D.A.R.Y.L./’85 covered much the same ground, but Spielberg isn’t done with us and spins out an extra hour to fill us in on the end of mankind, the return of his aliens from ENCOUNTERS (thinner than ever!) and, in the only emotional jolt of the pic, the still standing towers of the World Trade Center in the watery grave of future NYC. The film looks wildly expensive, but the effects just weigh things down with too much smoke, fog, mirrors & arty silhouette shots. It’s exhausting. We’re supposed to cringe with disgust at the tasteless Fun Fair scenes (sex, gambling, sadistic demolition sideshows & junk food), it’s Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island and, look!, there’s Brendan Gleeson making like Stromboli, the puppet show master. Jude Law is (somehow) very good as a smoothie robot gigolo, but he lets us down by not showing us his secret technique for a good time. Everyone else makes like zombies (very Kubrickian), except for Haley Joel Osment as the creepy kid who wants to be real. You gotta go back to old Luise Rainer films to find an actor who spent so much time looking up hopefully.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Robin Williams, who does a voice-over in this, last worked for Spielberg in HOOK/’91. Can we keep these two away from each other?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Duh, PINOCCHIO/’40.

BARTLEBY (1972)

Herman Melville’s mordant novella about Bartleby the Scrivener (a sort of copyist/accountant) has such a strikingly modern tone, you turn the pages expecting to bump into Kafka, Camus or Beckett. The story could hardly be simpler; Bartleby, a young man, reserved to the point of near inertia, applies for a dead-end job at a small accounting firm. At first, he’s odd, if productive, but as the weeks pass, he ‘prefers not to’ do anything. He becomes something of an immovable object, both tolerated & resented. Melville offers no easy explanation or solution for what happens, it’s part of what makes the book so modern, but then he goes much farther, making it funny, off-putting & tragic, all at the same time. This version (like the one from 2001 w/ David Paymer, Crispin Glover & Joe Piscopo!!) moves the story up to the present, paradoxically decreasing its startling modernity. Still, if this version makes the story too consistently somber, barring a fine quick outburst of muderous black humor, at least it avoids the ‘wacky’ tone of the 2001 adaptation. (Which, in any event, is so poorly directed it’s hard to sit thru.) John McEnery makes a memorably gentle mystery out of Bartleby, but the film belongs to Paul Scofield as the boss who can’t quite give up on the lad. (He apparently turned down the Robert Mitchum role in David Lean’s RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70 to make this tiny indie.) Director Anthony Friedman locates the strangeness in Melville’s story, yet never over-milks it, and he uses the milling crowds of ‘70s London to fine impersonal effect.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Don’t hold your breath for a straight visualization with its original narration and proper 19th century setting, but has anyone ever thought about turning this into an opera? If ever a phrase was made for a leitmotif, it was ‘I would prefer not to.’

READ ALL ABOUT IT: You guessed it, Herman Melville’s BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. You can read the entire novella in the time it takes to watch this film. Don’t let MOBY DICK scare you off.

SUBARASHIKI NICHIYOBI / ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY (1947)

It’s clear, right from the opening shots of his seventh film, that Akira Kurosawa has suddenly become a master. This may be a small, intimate film, but Kurosawa gives a bravura performance. He shows a new confidence, a ‘rightness’ in each shot, in the editing & pacing, in the writing & acting; and such a lovely heartfelt story of its times, it’s hard not to fall for it. There are echoes from romantics like Frank Borzage & F. W. Murnau in their films with Janet Gaynor, and even a huge swipe from James M. Barrie’s PETER PAN at the climax after we've spent a Sunday with Isao Numasaki & Chieko Nakakita roaming thru post-war Tokyo. The young couple are too poor to set up a home & marry, but they meet once a week to walk around their still devastated city, to dream of buying a house or renting a place of their own. Maybe they’ll splurge on a dreary cup of coffee or try to grab a pair of popular-priced symphony tickets. Kurosawa has to make do with a bit of poverty himself, unconvincing studio sets, the scrawniest string section ever to play Schubert’s ‘Unfinished,’ a few marvelous 'stolen' shots on real city streets filled with real city people. And while the narrative largely consists of these two lovebirds getting doors slammed in their face or struggling with their own unconsummated passions, Kurosawa tempers the hard knocks with glimmers of hope. At least, for those who can still believe in Tinkerbell's magic.

NONE BUT THE BRAVE (1965)

Frank Sinatra hit the director’s chair for this standard-issue WWII film about a Japanese unit left behind on a nameless Pacific Island until they get crashed by a planeload of American troops. It’s a gimmick, but a useful one: how does war play out in a vacuum?; can an ad-hoc truce hold once the men restore communications?; who wants to be the asshole on the atoll? A neat premise for a helmer like Sam Fuller, Robert Aldrich or Don Siegel, but not, alas, Sinatra whose attention wanders alarmingly. He gives himself the showy role (he’s Francis the Medic!) and he also gives himself the big dramatico scene (an anesthesia-free leg amputation on a wounded Japanese). And damned if he doesn't handle it effectively, largely in a carefully composed mastershot. But too much of the staging is perfunctory, with action sequences that don’t ‘read’ and lazy line-ups straight across the screen. The Japanese actors come across well enough, but the American contingent is plumb awful. By the time we hit the big insanity-of-war climax, it all feels like one big set up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If you turn the subtitles on for the Japanese dialogue, it gives you subtitles for everything, Japanese and English. Annoying. Why not watch it without them for that Mystery-of-the-Orient effect like in the old SHOGUN mini-series.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Clint Eastword's WWII two-fer, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS/'06 and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA/'06 tackles the WWII East/West POV in epic fashion.

IO SONO L’AMORE / I AM LOVE (2009)

Even the opening credits are swoon-worthy in Luca Guadagnino’s ultra-lux pic about a wealthy Milanese family (the Recchis) who seem unaware that they are entering a two-fold crisis. On the business side, Grandfather is passing on the family textile concern to his son (Tancredi) & eldest grandson (Edoardo). Thoughts of Lear splitting his kingdom spring to mind, but it’s the brave new world of global economics that will take charge of events. On the personal side, with Granddad gone & his wife suitably moved to a chic apartment, the estate is now run by Tancredi & his beautiful Russian-born wife, Tilda Swinton. But a life changing meal, prepared by her son’s friend & business partner, ignites an inexplicable romantic folly (right out of a Tolstoy novel), and her meticulously designed & organized life suddenly palls. Tragedy may loom around the corner, but at least everyone will be properly dressed. The film is often successful in reviving tropes out of a ‘50s romantic drama (imagine a collaboration between Visconti & Douglas Sirk) with a pulsating John Adams’ score to ‘mod’ things up. (‘The Chairman Dances’ gets a workout.) But halfway thru, Guadagnino begins to mistake fashionable with fashion, dropping the ball on simple plot points, and asking too much from what he’s got to offer. It's like one of those exquisite, but tiny plates of food. The film remains a treat to look at, though less so when we hit the placid countryside where we could have done without the flowers & insects seconding the illicit lovemaking. Meanwhile, the business angle, which might have helped balance the film’s relationships & storylines, gets terribly short shrift.

DOUBLE-BILL: Otto Preminger's BONJOUR TRISTESSE/'58 is a masterful example of the form.

OSSOS / BONES (1997)

Pedro Costa’s hypnotic and hypnotically depressing film about the somnambulistic residents of a poverty stricken neighborhood in Lisbon, Portugal is more a contemplation than a narrative, fittingly so. The cast of cast-offs struggle to raise their eyelids as they move thru the day. One ‘borrows’ an infant as a tool for begging . . . or perhaps as barter? Another is more ambitious, vacuuming the homes of absent middle-class employers while a relative comes along to sleep on the sofa. Perhaps the garbage will yield a meal or two? The air of defeat is suffocating. Yet, the film, with its still camera set ups & heavy atmosphere has the bewitching tone of ‘found beauty’ in its warm colors and the frames-within-frames composition style, even as a vague rumble of threatening violence & loss smothers any possibility of social or economic movement. The poetry of poverty is a dangerous conceit for those who have to live the life, but it may be Costa’s great subject. (The film is part of a loose trilogy not yet seen.)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story may take place in 2056, but it already feels dated. A fable about fate & freewill, it imagines a crime-free city that arrests perpetrators before the fact, thanks to a trio of floating soothsayers. Tom Cruise is chief dick on the program, a divorced dad who lost his son years back, now hoist on his own petard when the seers point his way. That’s when the film tips from ‘manhunt’ to ‘man-hunted,’ a high-tech Innocent-Man-On-The-Run much like Harrison Ford in THE FUGITIVE/’93. [SPOILER!!: You’ll recognize Colin Farrell & Max Von Sydow in roles played by Tommy Lee Jones & Jeroen Krabbé in the Ford pic.] Spielberg is so relieved to get the heck out of that crime lab, a blue-toned cocoon of I-PAD projectiles you play with your hands like a Theremin, he celebrates with some goofy gags. There's a yucky pair of detached, roll-away eyeballs, and he even pulls off his own variation on a conveyor-belt set piece Alfred Hitchcock spoke of but never found a spot for. But all too soon we return to unearned solemnity and those suffering saint-like seers. Very Stanley Kubrick meets Ron Howard.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Cruise literally has to drag one of those seers along for the rest of the pic. No doubt, just how Spielberg felt about having to finish this one.

STATE OF PLAY (2009)

Ever since NO WAY OUT/’87 was allegedly ‘saved’ with a final twist that made mincemeat of the whole plot, political-thrillers have been wrapping things up with one revelation too many. So it goes with this generally involving remake of a six-part British mini-series. The story has moved to D.C., and the subject now centers on corrupt military contracts, but the most intriguing element in the film is only glanced at, the newly evolving pecking order between print & on-line journalism. It gets lost in the inexperienced hands of megger Kevin Macdonald who’s busy enough keeping all the plot-lines straight between chases, hitmen, rub-outs and various journalism tropes ripped less from today’s headlines than from ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN/’76. Sporting an unwashed pageboy as the ink-stained reporter, Russell Crowe gives one of his better recent perfs, but Rachel McAdams makes little contact with her ‘Junior Miss’ on-line reporter. Helen Mirren’s tough-guy editor hasn’t enough screen time to compete with Bill Nighy’s priceless perf in the mini-series. (Hey, who cast an Aussie, a Canadian & a Brit in these key roles?) As married politicos, Robin Wright & Ben Affleck do little for themselves or each other, but Jeff Daniels makes a meal out of his few scenes as a power-broker Congressman. Sounds like a lot of demerits, but it does hold you . . . right up to that double-helix trick ending.