The rule is the same: I write down and briefly review every movie I watch, whether it be in a theater, on video, or on the tube. Note that many of these films were not new in 2000--the list is "movies I saw," not "new movies I saw," meaning there are films here that were released many years before. If it's here, it just means that I watched it in the second quarter of 2000. Many of these I'd also seen before, but my tally is by number of titles, not number of viewings. Films are listed in the order I saw them.

Hey, what's up with the links? Each movie title is linked to its entry on Amazon.com. (If you want to know more about my relationship with the online retailer, you can read my brief essay "Why I'm in Bed With Amazon.com.") Where available, the links lead to the DVD edition of each film; if no DVD is available, the link goes to the VHS version. If there is no entry for the film on Amazon, the link instead goes to the Internet Movie Database.

Awards
Someone asked me if I was going to start giving awards to the films I reviewed, so I figured what the heck. These categories are arbitrary and are likely to change from quarter to quarter.

The Sucked Its Own Ass Award for Q2/2000: BATTLEFIELD: EARTH

The Most Eye Candy Award for Q2/2000: STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART

The Best Movie I'd Seen Before Award for Q2/2000: BLOOD SIMPLE

The Best Movie I'd Never Seen Before Award for Q2/2000: POSSESSED

High Fidelity
Hailed as a romantic comedy for guys, and rightly so. A very fun John Cusack movie with a handful of relationship truths mingled in with lots of humor. The staff of the record shop reminded me eerily of the staff of my company, Pagan Publishing.

MST3K: I Accuse My Parents
Wow. A high-school student's drunk, party-hungry parents set such a bad example for him that he gets mixed up with criminals. At his trial, he accuses his parents for raising him so badly. The judge wags his finger at the camera and says something like "They aren't the ONLY bad parents out there!" Melodrama taken to new depths.

MST3K: Angels' Revenge
Whoo hoo hoo...Jim Backus and Alan Hale Jr. cameo in this '70s babesploitation flick about a bunch of do-gooder dames who rig up a van with armor and machine guns and go fight drug dealers. Uncannily similar to the "Fox Force Five" gag in Pulp Fiction.

Ghost Dog
Forrest Whitaker in one of his good movies, which seem to alternate with his bad ones. I liked Ghost Dog quite a bit. It was interesting to see Jim Jarmusch tackle a seemingly action-oriented gangster thriller and imbue it with his shambling humorous style. Very funny, very well done. Great characters. Bizarrely enough, a company is publishing a licensed Ghost Dog roleplaying game. For another excellent Forrest Whitaker flick, rent Smoke.

Moon Over Tao
Japanese action flick that merges fantasy with sci-fi. The plot involves bad guys in ancient Japan exploiting the powers of an alien artifact that draws the attention of some butt-kicking female aliens. Lots of great action, much fun. There's a big freaky demon monster at the end that's quite something.

Fail Safe
Live TV version of the novel, with a tremendous cast and stylish production. Not one for the record books, but enjoyable.

Keeping the Faith
Enjoyable romantic comedy is better than I expected, but not great. Some of the humor seems incongruously silly the overall credible narrative, such as the Heroes of the Torah Trading Cards, and towards the end there are some baffling omissions in the growth of the characters. But still, it's a pretty good time.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
A half-dozen viewings later and I'm still lovin' it.

Bad Day at Black Rock
Spencer Tracy is a mystery man with a bum arm who starts poking his nose into the tiny desert town of Black Rock. A terrific little film with Tracy in fine form. The scene where, one-handed, he kicks the substantial ass of Ernest Borgnine is a great Old Hollywood brawl. Interesting in its sympathy for the plight of Japanese-Americans interned during WWII.

East is East
Very enjoyable comedy-drama about an Indian family in England during the late 1960s--your basic culture shock/generation gap flick. Very funny, great characters, and some nice ambiguity in the conclusion insofar as it's a conclusion, not a resolution.

U-571
I liked this WWII submarine thriller, but a week later I'd pretty much forgotten I'd ever seen it.

Let My Puppets Come
Mind-blowingly bad 1970s hardcore porn flick with a cast of muppet-style puppets. My only guess is that the producers were so whacked on sex and cocaine that they convinced themselves this would be a brilliant idea. Terrible jokes, terrible music/dance numbers, and of course the sex is just for laughs; the opening sequence features a puppet woman doing it with her puppet dog, who promises her in a typical muppety voice, "Don't worry about the neighbors--I'm discreet!" Worth watching in some respects, such as for the amazing variety of hokey comedic sound effects that were already cliched twenty years earlier; hearing them in this film calls up memories of countless bad DePatie-Freleng cartoons. Has the sensibility of a borsch-belt comedy revue gone horrifyingly awry. Prefigures Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles, but that film was creative, outrageous, and funny as hell; this one is just awful.

Gladiator
Gorgeous to look at, and Russell Crowe kicks sixteen kinds of ass, but I ended up unimpressed with the story and script.

The Virgin Suicides
Here's a weird situation. The score to this film is by a French band called Air, and it's a brilliant album. I found the score in a record store a couple months before the movie played in Seattle, and since I was curious about the film I auditioned the CD at a listening station. It sounded good, I bought it, and really, really fell in love with the music. I listened to this album endlessly while walking, writing, anything and everything. The album includes some snippets of dialogue and narration from the film, and the more I listened to it, the more I began to see the film in my head, or at least the more I felt the tone of the film forming in my head. When I finally saw the film--well, it just wasn't what I had imagined from obsessively listening to the music, and I ended up being disappointed. I have no idea how I'd have felt about the film without having experienced the music beforehand; I might well have loved it. But ultimately, I felt the score was superior to the film, and that there was a far more interesting film trapped in the music than the one that got made.

Eyes Wide Shut
Kubrick's final film is engaging and mysterious, and I like it a lot. I really enjoy the way the main character takes one step off the path of his ordered life and suddenly this yawning subculture of weirdness and sex opens up all around. The film reminds me of the fiction of Robert W. Chambers, and also my game Unknown Armies.

MST3K: The Sidehackers
Someone thought the motocross + platform/sidecar sport of "side hacking" was going to be big, I guess, so they cranked out this bikesploitation flick in the mid-70s to capitalize on the would-be craze. I've never heard of this ludicrous sport, though I've been told that it is indeed played, especially in Europe. Whatever. The film-makers went for an edgy thriller about two rival side hackers, and ended up with a terrible, nihilistic story that plays like a low-budget Straw Dogs. Being relentlessly grim and violent while simultaneously laughably incompetent makes for an unsettling combination.

Love's Labours Lost
Kenneth Branagh's new Shakespeare flick is a collapsed souffle: a sweet mess. He stages the play as a 1930s musical, complete with big colorful dance numbers. It falters often, and the whole ending is a protracted disaster, but there are lots of fun scenes and the music numbers are almost all delightful.

The Last Wave
Early Peter Weir film has an interesting Lovecraftian cosmicism to it. A man of aborigine descent is murdered in the heart of Sydney, apparently by other aborigine descendents. The lawyer appointed to defend them connects to their situation in mystical dreams, revealing a secret apocalypse of epic proportions. Wonderful film.

American Psycho
Very entertaining and funny film, based on the novel by Bret Ellis. I liked the novel quite a bit--it's a savage, Swiftian attack on elitist consumer status mongers, with a marvelous deadpan wit and a stunning ending. The film does a good job, but actor Christian Bale does his voiceover about one and a half steps over the top: his voice is a reassuring wink to the audience that they're supposed to be laughing. This broadens and coarsens the story, but does make it more accessible for people oblivious or unaffected by the novel's refusal to laugh with the reader. However, the director bungles the ending moment in a minor but frustrating way, eschewing the very visual and satisfying conclusion of the book for no good reason.

Brain Candy
Delicious movie from Canadian sketch comedy gods, The Kids in the Hall. A terrific assortment of characters, lots of funny bits, and a thoroughly enjoyable flick.

Mission: Impossible 2
I really want to see a better James Bond movie than we've been getting, but this isn't it. In its favor, the early scenes in Spain do Bond foreign-glamour right, and much of the techno-gadgets are real (or almost real) and not ridiculous. (As technology catches up to Bond, Bond's gadgetry looks increasingly stupid.) But once the action shifts to Australia, the scenery turns lackluster and the villain is bland. Pacing between action scenes is a problem, as well, and I wish screenwriter Robert Towne hadn't been willing to compromise narrative credibility in the condescending belief that summer audiences will tolerate moron movies if they're flashy and sexy. Finally, the supporting cast is wasted; Tom Cruise does some good work here, but I would have liked to see more of Ving Rhames and a replacement for the generic Aussie sidekick. The triple crown of high-quality action, glamour, and story is still out of reach of Hollywood, it seems. Face/Off, though flawed, was much better.

To Die (Or Not)
Wonderful Spanish art flick. A series of six apparently unconnected vignettes each end with a character's death, mostly tragic or senseless. That's the To Die half. Then the movie unspools in reverse order--the Or Not half--playing back the vignettes from last to first except now, no one dies; each character who survives goes on to appear in the next vignette through happenstance, preventing that death, and so on. At the end you're full of joy and hope and awe for the infinite little ways our lives are intertwined.

Road Trip
Bleah. An inferior copy of American Pie, with far fewer laughs and less-credible emotional & relationship content. American Pie was no masterpiece, but it scored with lots of humor while maintaining a degree of integrity and compassion for the topic of young love/lust. Road Trip isn't very funny and has nothing worthwhile to say. A few good bits, but mostly a waste of time.

Possessed
Like a Danish version of Schwarzenagger's End of Days, only without all the ass. Terrific movie, with some clear debts to The Kingdom. The Antichrist is manifesting as an Ebola-style virus, pursued by a self-promoting immunologist and a murderous priest (Udo Kier) obsessed with the apocalypse. Great stuff, very recommended.

Shanghai Noon
Good & funny Jackie Chan pomo oater. Sidekick Owen Wilson would have stolen the movie if he wasn't so goldarned happy to be on screen with Chan; Wilson's easy-going charm and naivete are straight out of his debut in Bottle Rocket, but still work wonderfully here. Fun stuff.

The Frame
Average drama from Japan about an ambitious TV journalist and the wrongfully-accused man whose life she wrecks with her show. Some neat twists and a generally good story, but either Japan has some seriously screwed-up journalism practices or the film-makers didn't know much about the business, because many of the events and twists would be pretty much beyond belief in the U.S. If 60 Minutes did what this character does, the guy she ruins would end up owning CBS.

Battlefield: Earth
Takes the prize from Sphere and Mission to Mars for Worst Hollywood Movie Ever. It's as bad as you've heard, or worse. Worth seeing if you're with friends, are drunk, and are ready to openly ridicule the proceedings. It's hard to isolate the worst scene, but it's probably the stunner where John Travolta simultaneously demonstrates his evil and his marksmanship by laser-blasting the legs off a herd of cows.

Shiri
Kick-ass South Korean action thriller tops many Hong Kong ones in terms of narrative credibility and production values, though it lacks the visual kineticism and slo-mo antics of John Woo and Ringo Lam. The North Korean military trains a woman to be a top-level assassin, and two South Korean intelligence agents hunt her down. Lots of shootouts, some great special-ops raids, a decent storyline, and a superb level of craftsmanship add up to a very satisfying flick. I saw this at the Cinerama, one of the largest movie screens in the country, and that probably helped.

Blood Simple
I'd only seen the Coen brothers' debut film once, on video in high school a decade ago. Seeing it for the second time, and this time on the big screen, was quite an experience. It's an excellent film, with a wonderful sense of place that doesn't have any sense of irony to it--curious, really, given their irony-heavy locales in Fargo and The Hudsucker Proxy. Good stuff, with a wonderful, bravura final moment.

Nameless
Spanish horror thriller adapted from a story by Ramsey Campbell, with production design lifted bodily from Seven and editing tricks ripped from Jacob's Ladder. But hey--steal from the greats. The blatant visual ripoffs nevertheless result in a creepy, diseased-feeling film about a kidnapped little girl and the weird religious cult that has her. It's got an intriguing mystery, lots of freaky, decrepit urban-decay locations, and some good characters. In fact, it's pretty top-notch up until the climax, which just sort of falls apart.

Nobody Knows Anybody
Another Spanish thriller, this time set in Seville during Holy Week. A millennial sect is committing terrorist acts, like releasing Sarin nerve gas and blowing up a church, apparently to presage the coming of the antichrist. A guy starts investigating the crimes because he suspects his roommate's involvement. The jaw-dropping twist, which I'll reveal here since it's unlikely this ultimately mediocore film will be seen much outside of Spain, is that the roommate is involved--and he's the gamemaster for a group of psychotic roleplaying gamers. They don't believe in the whole antichrist schtick, but their characters do, so they're playing it to the hilt. They've got character sheets, dice, miniatures, a tabletop model of Seville, the whole works. A crucial plot point is even resolved with a roll of 2D12. I was floored by this whole development. Still, the twist serves to derail what was shaping up to be an intriguing thriller, leaving it sort of flopping and directionless.

Straight From the Heart
Wow! I've been wanting to see a Bollywood flick for some time, and damned if this wasn't a great one. "Bollywood" ("Baliwood"? I forget.) is slang for the Indian film industry, which cranks out huge, glossy romantic musical/dance movies worthy of Hollywood's glory days. Straight From the Heart is more than three hours of wall-to-wall melodrama with what seems like a massive music & dance number every ten minutes. An Italian-Indian singing student comes from Italy to India, to study with a great singing master and live in the guru's extended family's manor. He and the master's daughter fall in love, but before they tell anyone, her father has arranged her marraige to some guy. Finally the Italian guy leaves for home in tears, the daughter likewise miserable on the eve of her wedding. Cue intermission--that was an hour and a half right there. The new husband proves to be a really wonderful guy, a lawyer who is the son of a prominent lawyer. His problem is that he's a terrible lawyer--he can't stand lies. When he learns that his new wife is in love with another man, he resolves to take her to Italy to find the guy and reunite them. He loves her so much that he just wants her to be happy, and if that means losing her, so be it. They go to Italy, ransack the countryside, bicker a bit, but over the next hour and a half she starts to realize what a swell guy her new husband is. Meanwhile, he accidentally meets up with the singer, but they don't know who each other are. They spend a day hanging out, two indians in Italy, and part as fast friends. Soon they figure it out, and we come to a sweeping climax at a glorious opera house where the singer is to make his big debut. Who will our heroine choose--the lovable, free-spirited singer or the loving, compassionate homebody? This was actually the best movie I saw at the Seattle Film Festival this year. It's exciting, romantic, fast-paced, and full of amazing technicolor visuals, intricate dance numbers with tons of people, fast and fun music, and so much story & emotion that it's like a rich buffet of gooey cinema goodness. There may be lots of other Bollywood flicks just like it, I dunno...but I sure enjoyed the hell out of this one.

The Sixth Sense
Holds up wonderfully to repeat viewing, and still manages to be quite creepy.

Titan A.E.
Silly, often stupid story, but still great fun. Offers lots of amazing visuals in the form of incredible alien landscapes. Totally worth watching, despite the lame script.

MST3K: The Pod People
Agh. Horrible, stupid movie elevated solely by the inclusion of an adorable kitten. The monster is a kid in a gorilla suit with a mask that looks like the old arcade game character Q*Bert; evidently they took their cues from the gorilla suit + diving helmet of Robot Monster.

The Opposite of Sex
Very funny and entertaining black comedy with a very memorable narrator. The film got on my nerves a bit when it took cheap shots for easy laughs--"hey, look at the ignorant and hateful fundamentalist Christians!"--since it found lots of clever comedy in more original targets. But regardless, it's good stuff.

Comic Artists Make Films
A local non-profit film-making support organization recruited a bunch of local comic-book artists--including Roberta Gregory, Peter Bagge, Jason Lutes, and Jim Woodring--to make short films on Super-8. The results varied widely in quality and interest, and I don't think most of them lived up to the potential of the premise. But then again, these folks have their hands full making great comics, so why should they devote their limited resources to cranking out little flicks? An interesting experiment that didn't work out that well.

Chicken Run
The creators of the Wallace & Gromit shorts really delivered with this feature film. It's funny, beautifully animated, and relentlessly clever--in the way that A Bug's Life was and that Antz was not.

Starship Troopers
I really disliked this film when I saw it in theaters. Watching it on video, I liked it better. The spaceship scenes are gorgeous eye candy. It's still so full of moronic idiocy that it's hard not to shout at the screen, but as long as you can shut your brain off it's okay. The book, of course, was far better.