Film director Joe Dante had a clever idea earlier this year. It was to celebrate his favorite genre films via their trailers, and invite his friends and colleagues to do the same, providing intros and optional commentary tracks over the trailers themselves.

The result is Trailers from Hell, which launched early in July of this year. As of this writing, there are about 50 trailers on the site, with about three added each week. Curators of the site (i.e., the introducers and commentators) include Allison Anders who covers The Naked Spur, All That Heaven Allows, and Privilege, among others; Allan Arkush, who does Wild in the Streets and House of Bamboo, for starters; Larry Cohen takes on Spartacus and Hitchcock’s Marnie (which he dislikes); Stephen King-specialist Mick Garris broods on Kiss Me Stupid, Dementia 13, and White Zombie; Screenwriter Sam Hamm takes on 20 Million Miles to Earth and 13 Ghosts, among several others; Mary Lambert, director of Pet Sematary, concentrates on Corman, with considerations of House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death, among others; John (Animal House) Landis is slightly tonier with his reviews of Sunset Boulevard, Sweet Smell of Success (about which he mistakenly says that director Alexander Mackendrick is British), The T.A.M.I. Show (whose live show he attended as a lad), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (the trailer of which is so long that Landis’s fund of information is taxed); Edgar Wright, of Shaun Of The Dead, who talks about Dario Argeto’s Suspiria and the Amicus anthology film Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, among others; and of course there is Dante himself, covering Mr. Arkadin, The Innocents, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and The Terror, among numerous others. Soon director Jack Hill, among others, will be discussing Bloodbath and Foxy Brown.

The crew don’t review the trailers themselves necessarily (though Ms. Anders does note that the trailer for Privilege is misleading and Dante is frank about how bad the trailer for The Innocents proved to be), and their commentaries range from technical and informative, to highly personal (Ms. Lambert on Village of the Damned). And the trailers seem to come in themes. Currently there is an obsession with the hippie era, with Arkush on Wild in the Streets and Ms. Anders on Psyche Out. The joy of Trailers from Hell is that some of the best current filmmakers surprise us with their enthusiasm and knowledge of films often spurned by the mainstream yet which fueled their own artistry.

A close friend of mine is an Antarctica nut, and so hitting OMSI’s exhibition, “Ends of the Earth” (about the earth’s two poles) and seeing the Omnimax film Antarctica (co-produced by the National Geographic Society) were high priorities. In addition, I’d never seen an Omnimax film, and this critical lapse needed remedying.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is now located, in case you didn’t know, underneath the Hawthorne Bridge (1945 SE Water Avenue). We arrived around 12:30, leaving enough time to take in the exhibit before the movie. Since it was a Tuesday, we figured that there would be fewer kids, but no dice; the place was crawling with the out-of-control monsters, who raced from display to display banging the buttons with their fists before dashing off to beat up the next display and then the next, leaving a trail of their diseased snot and saliva on every activating button. The booths that required quiet and concentration, such as the one that offered three movies about polar exploration, were usually empty.

In any case, we endured this hubbub the way Shackleton endured the blast of cold polar air, and then retired to the Omnimax Theater, a huge globe that looks like a synagogue from the outside. The show started at two-thirty. The waiting area had a roped maze, from which one could observe the projectionist behind a glass wall, like a character in an old Star Trek, a specimen from another planet isolated for study. The projection booth itself was amusingly gargantuan, like the inside of Dr. Who’s TARDIS. After a series of warnings (turn off phones, et cetera) that were reiterated inside, and then again in a voice-over prelude to the film itself, we were ushered inside. The huge globe was dim and the stairs up the raked seating steep, taxing to heart attacks waiting to happen. We sat up high but to the left, which turned out not to be optimal. If you go, be sure to sit directly above and behind the projector (which rises in the middle of the room) for the optimum effect of the visuals and the speakers. The goal of the Omnimax screen is to preoccupy your peripheral vision, the way that the curved screen of the old Cinerama was supposed to do. The Omnimax screen is taller, but gradually you realize that the ultimate effect is to simulate the shape of the eye; looked at without perspective, so to speak, the shape of the screen recedes to a flattened oval.

The documentary itself was good, probably because it eschewed talking heads; instead it was a succession of unnerving glimpses into the hidden world of the South Pole. We were warned that the Omnimax movie can sometimes make viewers sick or dizzy, but it was the shots of the frozen caves beneath the ice at the bottom of the world that terrified me. The movie was 45 minutes long.

For the heck of it, we also took in Black Holes, the planetarium show, which was a brief-feeling 30 minutes. Liam Neeson narrated it clearly, and the computer generated effects were graspable, yet coming out I still didn’t understand what black holes were. Also, instead of using the half-globe ceiling, as I remember the planetaria of yore used to do, this film was basically set up like a regular movie, but with a large curved screen. In fact, it felt like a leftover Omnimax film. In any case, though the unspooling came off without a hitch, one did notice that the image isn’t terribly sharp, neither in the Planetarium nor in the Omnimax. Numerous artifacts also affect the Omnimax screen, such as tiny blips that you think at first are suppose to be birds, or tiny question marks appearing out of nowhere. Overall the screen just didn’t feel bright enough, which is odd, since a cooling system that looks like the back of the Alien’s head is employed to let it get as bright as possible. It’s possible to envision Omnimax employed for a traditional Hollywood action film, though it might cause a run in vomit bags, but only if the image were brighter and there is more optimum good seating instead of the 25 or 30 chairs behind the projector head.

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cutoff date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, The Writers, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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Frank Darabont (1959 - )
Ranking: Working Stiffs

The Woman in the Room (short, also writer, 1983); A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (writer only, 1987); The Blob (writer only, 1988); The Fly II (1989); Buried Alive (TV movie, 1990); “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” episode of Tales from the Crypt (writer only, 1990); “Showdown” episode of Two-Fisted Tales (writer only, 1991); “Showdown” episode of Tales from the Crypt (writer only, 1992); “German East Africa, December 1916″ episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (writer only, 1992); “Congo, January 1917″ episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (writer only, 1992); “Austria, March 1917″ episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (writer only, 1992); The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils of the Desert (writer only, video, 1992); “Young Indiana Jones and the Phantom Train of Doom” episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (writer only, 1993); “Palestine, October 1917″ episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (writer only, 1993);The Shawshank Redemption (also writer, 1994); Frankenstein (1994); Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father (writer only, TV movie, 1996); Black Cat Run (writer only, TV movie, 1998); The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: The Phantom Train of Doom (video, writer only, 1999); The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life (writer only, video, 1999); The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Adventures in the Secret Service (writer only, video, 1999); The Green Mile (also writer, 1999); The Majestic (2000); “Chasing Ghosts” episode of The Shield (2007); “Spanish Practices” episode of The Shield (2007); “Pilot” episode of Raines (2007); The Mist (2007); Tokyo Rose (also writer, 2008); Rescue Me, He’s Wearing a Moose Hat: And 40 Other Dates Over 50 (also writer, 2009); Fahrenheit 451 (also writer, 2009)

There are two directors who tender the flames of Stephen King’s movie reputation. The first is Mick Garris, a horror film specialist who appears to be the only director whom King trusts to bring his tales of terror to television and straight-to-video productions. For example, when King decided to repudiate the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, he turned to Garris, who mounted a TV mini-series that closely hewed to the book. But for prestige productions, King turns to Frank Darabont. The director, whose roots are in TV and special effects, has made a career for himself with three major motion pictures based on King stories.

After his first two major feature films, the most immediate linking theme in Darabont’s work, besides Oscar mania and a dependence on King, was an obsession with tall people. In The Shawshank Redemption , Darabont cast the gargantuan Tim Robbins as the poor fellow unjustly locked up in prison in the ’30s. In The Green Mile , also based on a King story, he cast character actor Michael Duncan as the behemoth with a heart of gold (but also makes him seem much taller than the actor actually is).

Visually, the two films look much different. Shawshank has a grittier, more realistic style. Green Mile, especially in its interiors, has the spare, focused, dynamic quality of the old EC comics. Darabont is credited with writing both films himself, and what seemed to be a relatively low output and a reliance on the pre-digested texts of others proved on closer inspection to be a much longer career. Darabont has been active in the movies since 1981, and 20-plus years is a long time in a cruel industry that does not forgive failure, or even temporary absences. One must admire him at least for surviving.

One way that Darabont has seemed to survive is by picking his friends well. Darabont has enjoyed the support of a series of mentors. He was an early associate of Chuck Russell, and, like many other currently successful directors, cut some of his cinematic baby teeth on an Elm Street movie. He came under the Spielberg umbrella by writing some of the Indiana Jones shows (and later working on Saving Private Ryan ). But his most important mentor has been Stephen King. Darabont has directed no less than three King pieces, including a short that was broadcast on PBS in 1983, a story that also focused on someone incarcerated — in this case a dying woman.

One of Darabont’s main themes is, then (and rather obviously), prison. Besides his first two features, there is a TV movie he wrote (Black Cat Run) that has a prison setting, and incarceration of one kind or another seems to have an allure for the writer-director. Even the non-explicitly penal films are metaphors for imprisonment: being buried alive, the prison of a malformed body in Coppola’s Frankenstein adaptation. Basically, it is an easy metaphor, but one that audiences respond to.

Darabont has also stuck obsessively to one genre. Almost all of his films and TV shows have been in the fantasy field. But if Darabont has become the premiere mainstream prestige interpreter of Stephen King, it is probably because he adapts the non-horror stories, which are more likely to attract a greater portion of the viewing public. Darabont seems to be drawn to the most crowd-pleasing elements in the King aesthetic; he emphasizes the sentimentality of the work over the suspense or horror. He wants to make “male weepies”, which in essence means male-oriented films that women want to see, too.

Height is not a frivolous approach to King’s work. As a tall, gangly, awkward, and basically ugly person, the world famous multimillionaire author has always stuck out in a crowd, first for socially painful reasons, and then later for the inhuman level of his fame (his success is so uncanny that John Carpenter was able to make a rather funny horror comedy, In the Mouth of Madness, speculating on the basis for that kind of achievement). King’s world is that of the ’50s, and Darabont embraces it ultimately to his detriment. King is an American child of the Eisenhower era obsessed with bullies, with social approval, with high school hierarchies, with the pop culture that kids from the ’50s experienced. As the victim of bullies, he also drifted toward respite in a heart-felt liberalism that is manifested in The Green Mile as a portrayal of a black man as a simple soul with a noble spirit that shows dignity under oppression, a creature singled out by God for a special gift. This is Stanley Kramer country. If the King-Darabont liberalism is rooted in vague, well-meaning films such as The Defiant Ones and Of Mice and Men, this approach also continues to form the basis for successful movies because the American commercial cinema naturally gravitates to that easy form of “feeling” that seems like thinking.

Darabont carried on this fixation on liberal pieties in The Majestic , from a script credited to Michael Sloane. Here, in a complicated setup, a ’50s screenwriter accused of being a communist loses his memory and is mistaken for a small town’s long lost son. His re-immersion in Americana gives him the courage to confront his accusers back in Hollywood. One of Jim Carrey’s foiled efforts at being taken seriously, the film has an emotional impact fed by his “Capracorn.” In this go-around, Carrey’s Peter Appleton is imprisoned by his memory loss, and his liberation is adopting small town values, portrayed as imprisoning in other films.

After a long hiatus from big movie making, Darabont returns to the screen with The Mist , another adaptation of a King story (this one from the book Skeleton Crew). Again, a prison of sorts is established, in this case a supermarket where random citizens of a small town are trapped when a mysterious mist surrounds them, out of which ugly creatures emerge to terrorize them. As usual with King, the horror is placed in an otherwise neutral or usually non-horrific setting, and the terror elements are derived from numerous predecessors, from Lord of the Flies to Carpenter’s The Fog. There is unintentional hilarity as clumsy humans fighting big bugs only set themselves on fire, and the group devolves into red state versus blue state as an apocalypse-welcoming religious fanatic (Marcia Gay Hardin) is pitted against the levelheaded movie poster illustrated family man (Thomas Jane). As in Planet Terror the villainous mist is ultimately the result of military experiments, and, unusually for a big Hollywood film, The Mist ends with a cruel twist out of The Twilight Zone.

For all Darabont’s efficiency, however, this is workmanlike cinema, the kind that appeals to the prejudices and inchoate beliefs of the mass public — in a higher form of justice, in an afterlife, in a racial equality that is not particularly equal. Yet Darabont seems to take it all very seriously, and ends up having his name on the credits of movies that feature remarkable ensemble acting: Morgan Freeman and Robbins in Shawshank; Tom Hanks, David Morse, Barry Pepper and Jeffrey DeMunn in The Green Mile; Laurie Holden in most of his films; and Thomas Jane in The Mist. If Darabont has not visually or narratively aspired to more in a career that is both long and short at the same time, he at least knows his limitations and mines cunningly the thin (if abundant) vein of his talent.

About four times a year or less, I read something on the internet that makes me clutch my fists, grind my teeth and wail to the heavens (or at least the ceiling) in envious frustration, “I wish I’d thought of that!” The latest bit of WWW news that inspires these cries of jealousy comes from Kim Morgan’s MSN blog . K. Bowen, a former film critic for Star Community Newspapers in Texas (and a former El Paso resident) reports via her own blog, Anti-dis-arts-and-Entertainmentism , some secret and interesting aspects of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Not only is the substance of the movie (and more important the Cormac McCarthy novel from which it is derived) based on a true case, one that occurred around the time of the movie’s setting (1980), but Bowen goes into even more detail about certain casting coups. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem ), the film’s cattle-stun-gun-wielding killer, is apparently based on Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra, part of a Lebanese family of gangsters based out of Mexico and the Southwest. In 1979, the Chagra family was linked to the assassination of a Texas district federal judge, John Wood.

Convicted of the murder was one Charles Harrelson, who died in prison and who had a sideline both hinting and denying that he was one of the JFK shooters in Dealey Plaza that November day in 1963 (an internet industry uses photographic evidence to try and prove that Harrelson was one of the three tramps). Harrelson also happens to be the father of Woody Harrelson, hemp activist and the actor who plays failed fixer Carson Wells in the film. Bowen writes that Harrelson has worked with the Coen Brothers before but I can’t find a previous common film in the IMDB. In any case, Bowen wonders out loud how much Harrelson and the Coens (who famously don’t do much research when they are writing scripts) knew about the Harrelson family connection while casting and making the film (both father and son deny that Harrelson had anything to do with the judge’s murder). My ire over the weblog entry is based on frustration that I hadn’t gotten there first (which I might have if I’d read Gary Cartwright’s book, Dirty Dealing, a true-crime book about the Chagra family, or done a tad bit internet research). In part I would’ve had to have been interested in Cormac McCarthy to have stumbled upon this news myself, and I’m not at all interested in McCarthy. But on a higher plane, I am touched with admiration. Isn’t this exactly the kind of research and revelation for which we turn to the Internet? Indeed, should journalists at every level, be it digital or print, aspire to unearth just these kinds of interesting and evocative connections? What’s embarrassing about the revelation, which has the potential for saying interesting things about the Coens’ working habits and Harrelson’s courage as an actor, is that the information was right there to be had with but a slight effort of will and research tenacity.

Hitman is a textbook example of a movie that epitomizes Hollywood’s formulaic approach to blockbuster hits, and in that regard can be cited at cocktail parties when an example is needed of Hollywood’s uniformity. Except that it is made by a French guy. Luc Besson (the director of The Fifth Element ) has evolved into a prolific producer and is, in his instincts and flair, more American than Hollywood itself (whose films seem tame and sluggish in comparison with Besson’s sleek action tale machines). Hitman is explicitly based on a supposedly popular video game, but in the execution comes across as identical to Besson’s previous productions, which include 90 some films (Kiss of the Dragon, The Transporter, and Unleashed, most of which he also wrote or co-wrote. There’s always the trained killer cut loose on society, the sleek, impossibly narrow nine-foot tall femme fatale who becomes the focus of the killer’s energies, and a succession of betrayals and revelations leading to higher corruption. Hitman is little different, except for the fact that he is bred, like a Freddie Krueger, as the bastard spawn of maniacs by a group of outlaw Christians, which is explained in the trailer better than in the film itself (and which makes the show sound like a knockoff of Martin Cruz Smith’s clever action series from the 1970s, The Inquisitor). He is called Agent 47. As in The Mechanic and most hitman movies since, Agent 47 is betrayed by his own organization and goes on the run, seeking revenge.

As played surprisingly effectively by the unlikely Timothy Olyphant, he has a shaved head and a bar code tattooed on the back of his head, which makes this undercover agent stick out in a crowded airport or train station like a tuxedo on casual Friday. The girl this time is Olga Kurylenko, who is yet narrower and taller than her predecessors. The attractively rumpled Dougray Scott is the constantly foiled Interpol agent on his trail. Prison Break’s Robert Knepper is the oily and corrupt Russian cop. Despite a couple of okay fight scenes, Hitman’s overriding uniformity with its fellow hitman movies makes it difficult to distinguish or even remember.

There is a reason why the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski is one of the great cult films of all time. It’s because it is one of the great films of all time. Too often cult films are inept, worthless failures that exact a charm on people seeking to shed themselves momentarily of art. It’s “fun” to like Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s “so bad it’s good,” one of the most disastrous aesthetic formulations of the last 30 years. Such cult films allow for a little slumming before returning to the difficult world of sense, logic, values, and aesthetics. In any case, the word “cult” has been degraded in connection with its use in movie criticism. A cult film used to be a difficult-to-see work whose lore was passed on as part of an oral tradition amongst rabid fans who spoke a private language. Such films were one step up from stage films, and very difficult to track down or read about. These days any film that a lot of people like and revere, such as Road House, a major studio release with big stars and repeated showings on television and several successful DVD publications, but which officially isn’t popular, qualifies as a “cult film.”

The Big Lebowski is good, and has been recognized as such immediately by many people. For example, I saw it three times before it even opened by attending all the advance screenings for critics. I even tried to get a publicist to give me the promotional stand ups of the cast that were on display in the Broadway Theater for months, but, typically, the publicist pulled a stonewall. There was never any doubt in my mind that it was yet another great Coen Brothers film. But despite the fact that the Coens were coming off of their Oscar-garnering Fargo, The Big Lebowski (released in 1998) was a bit ahead of its time. Seinfeld mania hadn’t translated to the cinema yet, and so a movie about nothing didn’t seize the popular imagination as it might have just three years later.

Now comes I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You (Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $16.95, ISBN-13: 978-1596912465), written by four guys just as obsessed and ticked by the film as I and everyone I know. The authors (Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Scott Shuffitt, Will Russell) manage a Lebowski website, and stage an annual Lebowski convention. This book is the product of their web work, convention mounting, and additional interviews. If The Big Lebowski is one of the greatest films ever made, then this detailed celebratory smorgasbord must be one of the greatest books ever published.

There was one previous volume on the film which I didn’t find mentioned in I’m a Lebowski, though it may be in there among all the colorful sidebars. It was the slim volume called The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film, credited to Tricia Cooke (Ethan Coen’s wife and a co-editor on most of their films) and William Robertson, a supposed Kentucky-based screenwriter who may actually exist (the Coens are fond of arch bulletins issued under prankish pseudonyms). If any of the book can be believed it offers an insight into the Coens’ filmic practices; if it isn’t to be believed, well, as the shrink says in the famous punchline, even more interesting.

Obfuscation is not the mandate of the I’m a Lebowski team. There are quite a few revelations in it. The biggest coup is that they manage to track down the real life counterpart to Little Larry, the car thief. His name is Jaik Freeman, and he is a now-adult, not-un-irked toiler in the film industry, just like his father, who really was a screenwriter disabled by illness (though he didn’t write Branded). The team gets the real story behind the car thievery that holds down the third quarter of the film. Other real life analogues are Jeff Dowd (the real Dude), Big Lew Abernathy and John Milius (who contributed to the creation of Walter), and Peter Exline (a college prof and former movie executive whose adventures contribute components of the Dude’s story). These interviews are fascinating to read and despite their revelations in no way minimize one’s pleasure in the film itself.

There is a lot of goofy filler in the book, such as Dude-quotient tests, a “Dude Libs” game, and a not necessarily enlightening series of interviews with typical fans. However, the bulk of the book is highly useful. There is a list of all the philosophical movements mentioned in the film. There are interviews with virtually every star of the film, even down to the guy who played Saddam Hussein in the dream sequence and the clerk in the Ralph’s at the beginning. Chapter Four is an interesting journey into the meaning of cult films and The Big Lebowski’s place in that tradition. After a chapter of interviews and a self-celebration of the Lebowski conventions, with lots of posters and pix, the last chapter is equally helpful. It kicks off with a “by your side” Lebowski guide keyed to the time codes on the Region 1 DVD. This list explains many of the film’s references and peculiarities and in-jokes, a feature obviously inspired by Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook. This is followed by a glossary, a soundtrack list, and a survey of Lebowski locations. One of the funniest features in the book is a compare-and-contrast sidebar that charts the real dialogue and its bowdlerized TV equivalents (page 35). There, Walter’s “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass” becomes “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps” (the Coens didn’t care what the actors said when they dubbed the lines for television). What’s missing is the legacy of The Big Lebowski, which can be seen in shows such as 30 Rock, where (to cite one example among so many) Jack Donaghy aide Jonathan is so obviously a newer version of Brandt. Or, things that people get wrong about the film. Like the confusion between Frankenstein and the Monster, and most people assuming that The Big Lebowski is the Dude, when it is really the disabled millionaire.

What the team are at pains to find out from all the subjects they interview is what makes The Big Lebowski such a cult film. What is its secret, why is it so special? But isn’t it obvious? It’s stoner humor. What the Coens set out to make, it seems, was another exploration of the work of a hard-boiled writer. They’d done Dashiell Hammett in Miller’s Crossing; they were to do James Cain in The Man Who Wasn’t There; but in Lebowski they were doing Raymond Chandler, modernizing Philip Marlowe for the 1990s, but coyly marrying the hardboiled genre to stoner movies like Up in Smoke. In the end, The Big Lebowski may be the most intellectual Cheech and Chong movie ever made.

Well, he’s at it again. Damien of Corvallis — video store clerk, dinner theater actor, admitted plagiarist — has added another post to his blog, Windmills of My Mind. As you will recall, earlier this year Damien dedicated his blog to “31 Days of Spielberg,” but the project, highly praised at other websites, was curtailed after 19 days (and Hook) by charges that Damien had used passages from at least one academic book on Spielberg to bolster his prose. Now, after a series of brief entries scattered over two or three months, including a paean to Roger Moore and a mea culpa of staggering cluelessness, Damien is back. He’s added a November 8 entry to his blog as part of a Faith and Film Blog-a-thon (blog-a-thons being the latest gimmick on the web to increase traffic democratically, but which really results in a bunch of cozily friendly blog buddies saluting each other). The film he chooses to praise is Shadowlands, because he identifies with the suffering of C. S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins. The entry comes across as another thinly disguised mea culpa — one in which, yet again, he manages to cast himself as the victim, rather than his readers, his publicists at other websites, and Professor Warren Buckland, author of Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Hollywood Blockbuster.

In prose of appalling illiteracy even for the Web, Damien counsels us from the start that “Suffering is a part of life. At some point in our time spent on this Earth we are all confronted with this truth.” For support of this truism, Damien turns to the bookshelf and draws upon … Jesus? Tolstoy? Kirkegaard? No. Charles Grodin. Chuck, as Damien is soon familiarly calling him, began his autobiography with a description of a childhood moment of crisis, one which Damien finds “eerily reflects one of my own experiences.” Damien, it seems, when once crying as a lad, found himself “disliking it to the point that I wasn’t so crazy about continuing on with this life if it was going to involve [sic]. It’s not that I was contemplating suicide or anything like that. I was just desperately searching for a way to ‘bargain’ with life such that I wouldn’t have to endure any more pain.” The informed reader might wonder if there weren’t a more recent occasion for a replay of this crying jag.

The funny thing about Damien’s plagiarism was that the passages he lifted were the only competently written parts of his blog. The rest is dross, as shown in the latest entry, one that, though citing conscious-wrestling moments, again admits no real culpability on his part for violating one of the main prohibitions of both the fourth estate and the academy. Instead he “wrestles” with the concept of suffering, like his hero, Lewis. Wading farther into the tides of prose clunkiness, Damien writes that, “For some individuals this is where the dealing with the reality of pain begins and ends. My college professor [he only had one?] once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: philosophers and drug addicts. The drug addict merely goes through life looking for the next distraction to keep himself occupied. The philosopher actually faces into the tough issues that life has to offer.” When the youthful Damien was “facing into” his torment, he was really “launching my tenure as a lifelong philosopher because in the midst of my tears I was asking a simple but vital question: ‘Why?’” Thank God the adult Damien is here to praise the youthful Damien for his foresight!

Claiming that Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Oskar Schindler are his “real life heroes,” Philosopher Damien broods philosophically over the question, “Why?” It turns out that this is “a very important question. In fact, ‘Why?’ may be the most important question a person can ever ask in his lifetime. The question of ‘Why?’ particularly seems to surface in the face of extreme hardship.” Personally I think it’s “Who’s on First?”, but that’s just me. Another question might also be, “Why did I plagiarize yet keep writing as if my thoughts merit publication?”

After a lot of self-praise for his philosophical meditations, Damien finally “faces into” Shadowlands (” it was this one or The Mission“). He summarizes Lewis’s life (no doubt with the aid of Wikipedia) and then re-tells the story of Lewis’s final, great love affair, as recounted in Richard Attenborough’s screen version of William Nicholson’s play (since Damien is an actor and director as well as a philosopher, video store clerk, and plagiarist, he would naturally be drawn to a stagy, overbearing theatrical adaptation for celebration in his forum), and spends a lot of time defending the film from charges of being Hollywoodized.

But the newly budding philosopher keeps blossoming through the critic’s pose: “Sometimes it seems to me that faith is perceived nowadays as a kind of unflinching optimism; a delusionary reassurance in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that ‘all will be well;’ it amounts to little more than closing one’s eyes, covering one’s eyes and singing ‘LA! LA! LA’ in the face of any and all adversity.” I can think of another reason to close one’s eyes as a shield from delusions. But the philosopher is finally rounding on his uplifting theme, which is that “pain and suffering can serve a purpose. A faith that has actually learned to confront the harsh reality of pain seems to me to be a deeper and stronger faith,” a lesson Damien perhaps learned during those sleepless, tearful nights when all those great big meanies were inexplicably attacking him (for something, it apparently needs repeating, he admits doing). Damien has suffered. But by suffering he has, like Charles Coulson, grown. He’s a survivor, and to the joy of tens of people (i.e., the close friends who populate his blog’s talk backs), he is now ready to proceed, to “face into” the completion of his Spielberg series. What Damien still refuses to “face into,” however, are facts. There seem to be two kinds of people in the world, those who admit their folly and find another line of work, and those who stumble on oblivious to their folly, turning their blog into a [sic] joke.

Each December 24th, at least in our Christian nations, children retire to bed knowing that in the morning, the heralded Santa Claus will have planted beneath the communal Christmas tree those gifts that embody their most secret desires. Thus gifted, the children and their parents are cleared to spend the rest of the day basking within the glow of the familial light, enhanced by food, reunions, and the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. There’s time to hate them all the more, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the other three hundred and sixty four.

The premise of Fred Claus is that Santa’s family is just as dysfunctional as those he visits every year. From the day of his birth, Nicholas Claus has been undermining his elder brother Fred — chasing away his bluebird of happiness, stealing the love of his mother — until he achieves “sainthood,” which means, at least in the movie’s terms, he and the rest of his family is given eternal life, and Nick goes to work for some mysterious “board” that holds the franchise on all children’s festivities, from the Easter bunny to the Tooth Fairy, to work as Santa Claus out of the North Pole branch. Fred, meanwhile, ends up Chicago as a repo man. If there is no hope for the Claus clan, what is to become of the rest of us?

Fred Claus is a good premise, or at least seemed to be so in the teaser trailer that came out before the film was probably even shot, showing Fred and Nick bickering on a couch. In the final result, however, Fred Claus is predictable heartstring pulling Xmas fare that frustratingly fails to live up to its potential. The goal of the story is to position cynical hustler Fred (Vince Vaughn) so that he has to change his stripes and take up the cudgel for the neutralized Nick, which he finally does after the film’s most glorious scene, in which Fred, back in Chicago in the wake of a disastrous sojourn in the North Pole, attends a meeting of Siblings Anonymous and finds guidance from the likes of Frank Stallone, Roger Clinton, and Stephen Baldwin.

Fred Claus is a backwards Elf, a reverse engineered The Santa Clause, but without the charm that would mask its derivative tear jerking tropes and borrowed cliches (”Fred, I have a bad feeling about this”). It’s the third collaboration between Vaughn and David Dobkin, with whom he previously did Clay Pigeons and Wedding Crashers, and in just those three short films the team has evolved from an unusual collaboration over edgy black humor material to crowd-pleasing comedies that rely on predictable set pieces. VV’s shtick is getting a bit tired. It’s Bill Murray overlain with an impatient edge, and more explicit anger. VV’s character is generally unlettered, hedonistic, a gambler and a hustler with the gift of gab and charm for the ladies. There’s the inevitable public dance scene, a bit that goes back to Ferris Bueller. Here, the scene is followed almost immediately by another standard, the “teaching an uptight guy how to dance” scene, in this case to the Stones’s “Beast of Burden.” It has an all-star cast, with Paul Giamatti, Rachel Weisz, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, and Kathy Bates — all of whom have received Oscars or at least nominations, but takes the easy way out with its broad jokes about Christmas and commerce and its treacly music, credited to Christophe Beck, that channels Desperate Housewives when it is not telling us to be uplifted by panoramic shots of special effects light shows.

The most interesting thing about Fred Claus is that it is a strike film, but not in the sense you’d expect. It’s not necessarily a film that was rushed into production to out-race the threatened writers’ strike, now in effect. Rather, it’s a film that reflects the preceding worry about a strike, found in the scenes in which the villainous Clyde Northcutt (Spacey) cuts the power, or Fred disrupts the workflow with his antics. We’ll probably notice similar evidence of worrying in other films about to come out. But aside from this purely sociological interest, Fred Claus quickly goes from “Ho ho ho” to “No no no.”

Matching the lack of will (or is it complicity?) on the part of the Democratic House, the movie industry doesn’t quite know what to do with the current Gulf War. A recent surge of films on the subject shows confusion, lack of commitment, and self-censorship.

Two of them bear a Peter Berg (the actor and director) - Matthew Michael Carnahan (screenwriter and brother of director Joe Carnahan) connection; two of them have a Meryl Streep connection. All three are vague and inconclusive.

The Kingdom is written by Carnahan and directed by Berg in the same style he brought to Friday Night Lights. It’s a sort of Soderberghesque manner with non-stop humming music and a roving, restless, jittery camera that suggests realism. Unfortunately, this technique here, as in the movie version of Lights, has the curious affect of distancing you from the action, shutting out the viewer and There is a key moment in The Kingdom that could stand in for all of these movies; Jamie Foxx leans over to a weeping Jennifer Garner during a big briefing and whispers something to her. We don’t learn what he said until the end and even then we don’t know what it was suppose to mean at the time or now. All of these movies are unwilling to say directly what they want to say, assuming that they have something to say.

A murder mystery set in the world of terrorism, The Kingdom concerns a group of oddly militaristic FBI agents sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate the terrorist bombing of a group of Americans working there. Foxx is the leader. He has to grapple with local resistance and intricate customs. Eventually he and his team track down the group or family involved in the terrorist attack, which appears to have been staged like a performance piece for a group of onlookers a short distance away. In the middle the film stages a chase and shootout on a freeway, like so many recent films, and ends with a lengthy shootout that evokes memories of Children of Men among so many other movies. The film also cites the Daniel Pearl case with its threat of a taped beheading. The film appears to make no explicit political statement but is vaguely right wing if only in its stand on shootouts and violence as the solution to political problems. The film moves in large action scenes interrupted with talky plot development scenes that are themselves mingled with “getting to know the quirky team” moments. The film ends with the viewer not knowing what really happened in its last 90 minutes. The Kingdom was finished earlier in the year but ended up undergoing some editing and an ending change. In other words, “meaning” and the film’s point were flexible enough to bear modification. What could or should have been a gripping murder mystery in a tense context, or a rah rah tale not unlike William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement, turned into a confused, compromised narrative without focus.

Lions for Lambs tells three almost-real-time stories that appear to be occurring simultaneously. In story one, reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) is summoned by Republican senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) as a conduit for information about a new approach to fighting in Afghanistan; in the second story, special forces in that country seem to be implementing the surge that Senator Irving is leaking to Roth (this section amounts to a dull story about wounded guys getting stuck behind enemy lines); and finally, in the third story, a college professor, Stephen Malley (a weird looking Robert Redford, who also directed the movie from a script credited, again, to Matthew Michael Carnahan) holds a student conference with a promising but disappointing student, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), and in the course of his vague recruiting pitch tells the callow, hedonistic youth the story of Ernest (Michael Pena) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke), former students who volunteered and are currently fighting in Afghanistan. In fact, it turns out that they are part of the surge and indeed are the two stranded soldiers.

The lack of specificity in these movies is maddening. It is not clear what Redford teaches. The mission of the strike team is not clear, nor where they landed. The cutting back and forth between the three locations is meant to be “ironical” in the (misused) Hollywood sense of the word, and it occurred to me later that it is probably suppose to be a surprise that the two prize students, who are “ethnic” and “ironically” more eager to fight for their country than the hedonistic Hayes, are the two soldiers. Why is Senator Irving leaking this policy change to a reporter, not a member of the president’s staff? Like the Soderbergh-directed Traffic and Soderbergh-produced Syriana, Lions follows multiple story lines, but there is little if any action, and the film is cast in the tone of a debate play. The dialogue is often quite good and quite well acted by most of the cast, especially Streep and Cruise, but the film’s ultimate point is unclear. Redford’s prof is surprisingly unintellectual. He tells the student that “words need a heartbeat, experience.” This segment of the movie comes across like a pious version of Hitchcock’s Rope, and Redford’s idea of “teaching” is to set up a debate in the classroom and then look with hard expectancy to see how people react to others’ points. Redford’s philosophy is vague (”Rome is burning, son”), and we don’t know exactly what he is arguing, except that it might be some kind of recruitment pitch.

Cruise’s senator makes a good case in his pitch, and points out quite accurately that today’s mass media is “a wind sock.” The movie is careful to give his senator a military background, and he comes across like Cadet Captain David Shawn if he hadn’t been killed off in Taps. But Cruise’s appealing earnestness and Streep’s realism can’t save the film. Lions for Lambs ends inconclusively and even open-endedly. I wish that different people had directed the film’s three sections, for example John Milius the Cruise debate, James Cameron the Afghanistan section, and Sidney Pollack the Redford tale. Peter Berg pops up as the leader of the Afghan strike force.

Rendition jumps around from one international location to another, and feels just as meandering and unfocused. The setup is simple in director Gavin Hood’s (Tsotsi and credited neophyte screenwriter Kelley Sane’s tale. Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is flying back to America from South Africa. He is an Egyptian married to a pregnant American woman, Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon). On the orders of Corrine Whitman (Streep again), whose official position is, as usual, vague, Ibrahimi is pulled out of the airport by the CIA, which whisks him away to a foreign nation where he is tortured in order to get the names and numbers he supposedly retains. There, a raw bureaucrat with a conscience, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), questions the efficacy of torture as an information tool (he takes matters into his own hands somewhat in the manner of the Ulrich Muhe character in The Lives of Others ), though to the wrong guy, the prime torturer himself, who is basically just in it for the job.

Isabella uses an ex-boyfriend to try to find out the location of her husband. He is Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), aide to her state’s senator (Alan Arkin). He butts up against the brick wall that is Whitman (by the way, Streep is terrible in the role, such a sad contrast to her work in Lions). There is a third story which has to do with the daughter of the torturer having a romance with a local Islamic radical, who is using her to get to and stop her father. As in Amores Perros, 13 Conversations About One Thing (which also starred Arkin), and other recent “web of life” films, it turns out that the three stories are told in a staggered time frames. But as usual, crucial details are kept cloaked or unspecific, to no end. The tale also wraps on a note that leaves too many questions about what happens next.

The film I expected to like the least turned out to be the best of the lot. In the Valley of Elah is written and director by the Oscar-anointed Paul Haggis, whose Crash was a blend of the stiffly well-meaning and the emotionally moving. Early reviews were not promising, noting its slow pace, and characterizing it as plodding and glum. Maybe it just hit me right after seeing three previous confused and confusing films about the Iraq war.

Set in 2004, just about a year after the war starts, the film concerns the efforts of Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a former Army MP who now hauls gravel in Tennessee, to find out why his son Michael (Jonathan Tucker) went AWOL shortly after returning from the Middle East. Hank drives to Fort Rudd in New Mexico where Michael was last seen, and shortly thereafter things take a turn for the worse. Eventually Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a recently promoted detective, comes to his aid, and in the course of their investigation are given the chance to look deep into the abyss of the human psyche damaged by war.

I appreciated its thoughtful pace, and the time it gave to Jones and Theron to communicate to the viewer visually instead of always via dialogue. The acting is powerful and subtle throughout, and the photography by Roger Deakins, who just shot Jones and Josh Brolin (who has a small part) in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men paradoxically captures the chill and silence of the desert. Maybe I’m just a sap, but I felt myself on the verge of tears throughout the film’s second half, and the quiet, hopeless gesture of the film’s last shot is overwhelming.

Movies and music have been aligned, even since the silent era. Though you couldn’t hear the dialogue, you could usually hear a musical accompaniment, from a full symphony down to a lowly piano or organ. Music, it’s true, hath charms to sooth the savage movie buff. Some great composers have created music for movies, and obsessive film fans collect their scores, from Bernard Herrmann to John Williams. Popular singers from mid-century were quickly absorbed into movieworld and often proved to be adepts at screen acting, which is all too often simply the skill of seduction that singers bring to a great song.

But when we get to rock and roll, things turn hinky. Rock is about hedonism, selfishness, private worlds, even anarchy, and these states run counter to the way movies get done in a highly structured and expensive system. And there are very few movies that either capture the flavor of rock or highlight the music itself in a way that captures the spirit of the music or the spine of the musicians.

John Kenneth Muir makes a good case in his recent book The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (Applause Books, 368 pages, $19.95, ISBN-13: 978 1 55783 693 9) that rock music and cinematic technology have “combined to create some of the greatest and most beloved movies of all time.” That is, until you begin to flip through its pages, which catalog most of the rock movies made in the last 50 years (though calling it an “encyclopedia” is a bit overkill for a narrow casting book of just a little over 300 pages; the 20 volumes of the Grove, an encyclopedia). How many are truly memorable, how many would you sit down and actually watch again, the way you’d listen to a Prokofiev symphony or watch a Hitchcock, Ford, or Coppola film? Damn few. Among the few I could come up with were A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, Tapeheads (not included in the book), Get Crazy, and The Ramones: End of the Century (also not included in the book). In the “encyclopedia,” brief celebratory accounts of the movies are interspersed with much more interesting essays about aspects of rock in film, such as rock star cameo, authority, the Yoko factor, and other interesting facets that occur when rock meets movies. In that regard it is a handy reference tool; as a critical guide, its approach is unblinkered enthusiasm amidst incompletion.

Three recent films drive home the real difficulties of marrying rock and film. Control is an account of the life and death of the Joy Division’s lead singer, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is the latest in a series of insta-documentaries about newly dead rockers, and I’m Not There is an unconventional biopic of Bob Dylan, the folk and rock singer-songwriter.

I know little if anything about neither Joy Division nor The Clash, and as far as I know have rarely even heard their songs. This makes me either the worst or the best judge of the clarity in Control. Ian Curtis was a young bureaucrat and married early, long before becoming a leader of the Manchester music scene. He also had a bit of problem with depression, and some suicidal tendencies, fully realized on May 18th, 1980 (coincidentally, the same day Mount St. Helens blew). His band, named after the sexual slavery area of a Nazi concentration camp, seems to have specialized in turgid ballads of adolescent angst. Once relatively famous, Curtis had an affair with a Belgian writer, and then on the brink of an American tour, hanged himself.

The film is made by Anton Corbijn, a photographer who had taken many snaps of Joy Division. Shot in black and white, the better perhaps to capture the gray oppressiveness of industrial England, Corbijn’s work is typical of the chronological rock biopic, blankly, almost neutrally stacking of scenes like letter blocks, but occasionally foretelling ominously the future, in this case repeated shots of the clothing rack which Curtis used (ironically in the film’s template) to off himself. What Control fails to make clear is why we should care about the private woes of a middling singer from 20 years ago. What lesson are we suppose to get out of this, aside from the invitation to bask ourselves in the adolescent depression that seemed to plague Curtis? As a tale of the rise and fall of a rock star, it is entirely conventional, and in fact, if the movie had starred Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, say, instead of the contemporary rock star Sam Riley, it could just as easily have played in the 1950s as a showbiz story.

Early in Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, the star of the show is shown wearing earphones and singing into a microphone. We can’t hear the music, at first, only the voice, which is a tuneless blast of industrial noise, a ragged, shrieking howl which, it turns out, the kids liked way back in the mid-1970s. Embedded in surrounding music, the voice is slightly more tolerable, but the songs are not, repetitious barks from a factory horn. Despite the fact that Strummer was a poor musician and singer (at least when he was sober), and argumentative with his rotating bandmates (when he wasn’t seducing their girlfriends), there is a certain measure of sentimentality about the man, who died in 2002. Thus unlikely talking heads such as Bono, Matt Dillon, and John Cusack are marched out in Julien Temple’s doc to sing his praises and fuel themselves with some of the heat of his fame. He apparently had a radio show in his later years and his rambling “views” are smeared over the soundtrack, to the delight of many, no doubt. Rock stars, it turns out, need not form any coherent political statements; anger and sentimentality will suffice. Strummer’s views are encapsulated thus in the film: “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks. I am one of them. But we’ve all gotta stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything. This is something I’m beginning to love. People are out there doing bad things to each other. It’s because they’re being de-humanized. It’s time to take the humanity back to the center of the ring, and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people, you’re nothing.” Much is made of Strummer’s “philosophy” of the bonfire as a communal occasion, but right now I can think of a better use for such conflagrations.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is the most ambitious film of the three, but also the worst. It is almost impossible to believe that such amateurism came from a director of his stature. Haynes’s conceit is that Dylan is split up into different people (and actors)–an idea borrowed, like virtually every other trope in the film, from European cinema (in this case Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire). The six different people who “play” Dylan are either shards of his reputation, different ways he may have viewed himself, or different people he might have been or become if his career had gone differently. For example Heath Ledger plays Dylan as if he had become instead a philandering, married movie star (unlikely, given his looks and voice, as we now well know). He is also an African-American runaway child, a woman, a Britisher (the most underused), his basic self (though prettied up in the form of the rugged Christian Bale), and Billy the Kid, in the form of Richard Gere. Each segment quotes from Dylan songs, movies, album covers, and famous photographs, and is cast in the style of a famous directorial predecessor, such as Richard Lester in the British sequences or Antonioni in the actor sequence. In effect, the film isn’t all that far from Kevin Spacey’s disastrous biopic of Bobby Darin.

It’s all very modern and post-modern and structuralist and all that. But as Andrew Sarris wrote a long time ago, a great director has to first be at least a good director, and the incompetence evinced in this film is beyond belief. Note the clumsiness of the faux documentary scenes with Julianne Moore as “Alice,” or rather Joan Baez. Did Haynes want these moments to feel strained, false, unconvincing, and inept? The whole Billy the Kid sequence is a non sequitur. If it were a short film on its own legs it would be laughed off the screen as the failed excrescence of a beginner. Cate Blanchett is receiving a lot of praise for her account of the newly “electric” Dylan, but it is just a physical impersonation, and seemingly based on the ability to wear thin black suits. Vocally it is as appalling as any lampoon of the singer. A lot of Dylan’s songs are about the singer of the song having knowledge that is beyond the victim of his harangue (”Like a Rolling Stone,” “Ballad of a Thin Man”), and in its purposeful obscurantism Haynes’s film wholeheartedly embraces Dylan’s world view to the exclusion of viewer, who knows something is happening but they don’t know what it is.