Top Ten Movies of all time

Heres my list of top ten movies of all time

1) The Lord of the rings trilogy

2) Titanic

3) The Shawshank Redemption

4) The Prestige

5) The Gladiator

6) The Godfather

7) The Dark Knight

8) Fight Club

9) Braveheart

10) The Usual Suspects

Donkey Punch

Despite my predilection for stories of the perverse and profane, I feel it is not my place to describe to any sort of public the act that gives director Oliver Blackburn's scrappy debut its name. For those who have spent any small amount of time in a frathouse, you know what a donkey punch is and have suggested engaging in it after at least three keggers. For the rest of you, these are the sort of things Wikipedia, if not the Internet itself, was made for. For the price of a movie ticket, however, you can now have a rather scummy British DJ explain it to you and then, a few scenes later, witness the event in all its glory.

A lesser filmmaker could have done nothing more than give the film its title and gone home. You'd certainly think that was the case from the film's opening notes: Three scantily-clad Brit birds (Nichola Burley, Jaime Winstone, Sian Breckin), on vacation in Spain, decide to take a spin on a yacht with a pack of tanned Aeropostale-types (Robert Boulter, Tom Burke, Julian Morris, Jay Taylor) with hits of ecstasy, a few Heinekens, and a DJ setup in tow.

While the more soulful pair (Burley and Boulter) spend some personal time on the stern, the rest of the group head downstairs for a wholesome orgy that crescendos with the youngest member (Morris) attempting the titular move, with fatal results. The body is then thrown to sea and the brood is sent into hysteria as they decide what to do with videotaped evidence of what happened. The law of the land being bros-before-hoes, the men band together while the surviving women employ knives, flare guns, and (why not?) a small boat engine to rid themselves of these hyper-masculine horndogs.

Like The Signal and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Donkey Punch is endemic of an inventive sect of the indie horror/thriller genre that, while often embedded in conventional scenarios, finds ways to minutely upend certain archetypes, reconsider mood and tone, and conjure suspense through crafty visuals and character development rather than piercing sound design and crass editing schemes. As the film transitions from the blissed-out daylight to the harrowing night, Blackburn carefully transitions his camera from shots taking in the entire bodies of the bikini-clad cohorts to close-ups of their panicked faces and wounds, including an agonizing shot of a piece of glass being pulled out of a knee and a flare burrowing into and shooting sparks out of a man's chest.

The fourth film in Magnet's ongoing Six Shooter series (which includes one of last year's best films, Let the Right One In, and the immensely entertaining Timecrimes), Donkey Punch is ultimately too minor and inconsequential a work to be taken seriously, too constricted by its own premise and unwilling to do away with certain totems. It does, however, serve as a thankful reprieve to the junkyard of Christmas season holdovers and studio mistake-purging that January so often affords the audience. Since nothing could be as good as the film's title, that's at least a small surprise.



Needs more Eeyore.

Yonkers Joe

Making a film about a scam artist is probably a lot like being one -- no matter how solid an idea seems, it's really all about the execution. The life of a cheat lends itself to high drama and conflict, but it can also be riddled with clichés. Throw in a mentally disabled son and a shot at the big score, and you've got a combination of storylines so obvious, they seem destined to fail. But Yonkers Joe doesn't fail. It's a spunky little indie that succeeds past its cheap conventions.

Both the credit and the blame go to writer-director Robert Celestino. His cornball plot shouldn't work, but his direction, especially with actors, does. Chazz Palminteri (Celestino's executive producer) is the title guy, a gambling stiff with an amazing ability to cheat crap games. He'll belly up to a table, pull some David Blaine-like moves to drop tainted dice into a game, and make a fortune. Unfortunately, Atlantic City security has his number, and private games are too small for his ambitions.

Enter Joe's 19-year-old mentally challenged son, Joe Jr. (Tom Guiry), staying with Dad after being booted from assisted living for being crude and violent. If Joe Sr.. can't straighten Junior out -- or make enough cash to pay for an alternative -- his gambling lifestyle will be seriously impeded. But if Joe can pull off one giant payday in Vegas…

You get the picture. Despite all the seen-it-before ideas, Yonkers Joe feels just a little different. Palminteri, an actor who telegraphs the "tough guy" image too often, softens here and lets his age (56) work for him, conveying a good sense of last-chance desperation and an inability to change. He's thinner and more wrinkled than in, say, The Usual Suspects, looking like a guy who's suffered too many bad bets, too many lonely nights.

He's countered well by Guiry, who understands that his rougher, more ridiculous lines ("Suck on a bowl of cocks!") are meant to deliver comic relief without cheating Joe Jr.'s intensity. Unfortunately, Guiry's performance is poorly timed; any able-minded actor playing a retarded character will now be judged by the infamous "Never go full retard" recommendation offered in Tropic Thunder. That said, I can't comment on whether someone of Joe Jr.'s intellect would react with the actions and comments we see here.

But suspending disbelief is not a problem with Yonkers Joe. You'll need it to get caught up in the assorted sleight-of-hand scams from swapping cards to palming dice. Celestino pulls back the curtain for us and never goes too far in explaining a scenario, letting Palminteri and buddy Michael Lerner chit-chat with their cheaters' lingo. It's all clear once the game's afoot.

Celestino is to be commended for keeping Yonkers Joe moving, with just a touch of awkwardness that balances out some run-of-the-mill dialogue. But his greatest achievement is in casting Christine Lahti as Joe's friend Janice. With honest and pursed-lip strength, Lahti reminds us how important she can be to a film, with a performance that recalls her achievement in Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty more than 20 years ago.

If you can watch Yonkers Joe without thinking it's a mild Rain Man rip-off, you'll enjoy a film that could have been plagued with plot issues, but rises above it. Hey, sometimes it's a crap shoot.



Let's get this bus going. Wapner's coming on.

Cargo 200

The lone indie release to butt heads this weekend with Edward Zwick's shallowly-scripted Defiance -- a revival of Nicholas Ray's lost technicolor opus Bigger Than Life not withstanding -- Cargo 200, the latest from Russian crime artisan Aleksei Balabanov, trades in the hired-gun thrills of the director's popular Brother trilogy for a highball of venomous gallows humor and satiric perversity.

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

As the professor goes ten rounds with the distiller over the existence of the Almighty, Valera (Leonid Bichevin) steps out on his fiancé with her friend Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova). A few spins at the discotheque, a long swig of booze and a quick hook-up later, the two are on their way to Valera's uncle's house to get "the good stuff." In classic interlocking fashion, the uncle happens to be the Commie-baiting distiller who has just sent the professor on his way home. Valera passes out on the floor while all the men begin to leer at his lady fair. It's the farmer's friend Zhurov (Aleksei Poluyan, a natural, plain-faced deviant), a Captain in the Party, who shoots the servant only moments before he forces poor Angelica to get on all fours and penetrates her with an empty bottle.

What at first appears to be a moderate Red remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quickly impregnated with satirical lunacy so grim that one might call it Russia's answer to American Psycho. Valera, an embodiment of yearning bourgeois ethos with his CCCP t-shirt already looking vintage, ditches the scene while Angelica becomes a "love" slave for Zhurov and the distiller goes down for his servant's murder. One of film's culminating images, a naked Angelica wailing, handcuffed to a bed and surrounded by a swarm of black flies and rotting corpses, is so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP.

Merciless in his eccentric brutality, Balabanov pirouettes on the line between dissent and patriotism. Made as a reaction to a burgeoning nostalgia for the days of wine and Bolsheviks, Cargo 200 is minor and discombobulated by its own outrage, but it is that very same outrage that gives it its rabid urgency. That the film flourishes from controlled dread to flailing hysteria and finally lands at its ominous (or is that hopeful?) coda is thanks to Balabanov's focus even in the most hectic of scenarios. More engaging and effective than its French equivalent (Frontier(s)), Cargo 200 sees the emergence of wicked days to come in the eyes of the erstwhile Union that, between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Gorbachev's mid-'80s perestroika, found itself without leaders, hope, or conscience.

Aka Gruz 200.

Eden Log

Credit where credit's due: Franck Vestiel's Eden Log grabs your attention immediately and doesn't relax its grip for a solid 20 minutes. A man (Clovis Cornillac) awakes in a pool of muck with a light pulsing on him every two seconds or so. He is in a cave of some sort but not much more can be gathered. That is until he finds the pulsating light that is emanating from a small contraption wrapped around a dead man's shoulder. Stumbling upon a small gated area, a simulation tells him that he is helping with the titular project and that he must go on, tangling with all manner of chuds and super guards along the way. The revelations continue, but this is about the point where you might consider walking into the theater bathroom, taking out your trusty Swiss Army knife and performing seppuku.

The trials and tribulations that face the man, who eventually finds out his name is Tolbiac, are those more suited that of a video game programmer than a young filmmaker. It is eventually established that Eden Log is some sort of natural habitat that holds a large plant with rejuvenating sap and roots that release a toxin that turns humans into the roving chuds. Among the monsters and the guards running around, Tolbiac encounters a being in what looks like a hazmat suit who ends up being a rogue female worker. Together, they attempt to find a way out of the labyrinthine root system, just as Tolbiac begins to feel the effects of the toxins.

There are more happenings that include a few carcasses filled with roots and some elongated video entries featuring the guards and Tolbiac. The latter goes a long way to destroying all the provocation that had been built up by the film's strong opening. Mainly corresponding in fits of grumbles, moans, and grunts, Cornillac's performance is ostensibly one of simple physical presence, and it calls for nothing but to summon the ability to run, mutter and, every once in awhile, tangle with a monster. It's an uninteresting performance that puts more stress on Vestiel's direction and writing than the French first-timer may want.

In 2006, Vestiel served as a first assistant director on Ils, one of the most acute and harrowing horror-tinged thrillers to come from France in the last decade. Eden Log deploys a similar scenario in that it is seemingly based in real time and revolves around one figure running away from a pack of intruders, though it is one set in a post-apocalyptic eco-nightmare rather than a country mansion. There are many reasons that Eden Log fails where Ils soared, but the most damning is that nothing ever seems to be at stake for Tolbiac. The monsters attack him about as often as they leave him alone and we're never quite sure what to make of the character's declining mental state besides a mildly violent outburst every so often. The audience isn't allowed to like or dislike the character in any capacity until the very end, and by then the cheat has already settled in. Like a video game, Eden Log accepts no emotional stakes in its premise and gives the viewer only the simple task of reaching its finale. At 98 minutes, a conclusion about an hour earlier would have been far more merciful.

The Class

Based on the French best-seller Entre le Murs, which literally translates into "Between the Walls," Laurent Cantet's The Class casts the author of that book, François Bégaudeau, in the role of himself as a real-life inner-city high school teacher embedded in the trenches of the war between classical education and the ever-changing face of modern culture. What initially bears the components of a typical retread of white-teacher-inspires-multi-ethnic-students melodrama turns out to be something much funnier than one might expect from the director of brooding dramas the likes of Time Out and Human Resources.

Cantet spent months auditing Bégaudeau's classes and ended-up casting many of the students as themselves in the film. Like many of its egregious American counterparts (Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, to name a few), Cantet has outfitted Bégaudeau with a melting pot of cultural and racial variants to contend with, including a goth and a smart Asian kid. Unlike those films, however, there is no effort to pigeonhole these identities, nor is there any effort to sanctify François. Though it garners much of its action through simple debate, one of the film's central dramas concerns François accusing two of his students of "acting like skanks." The teacher never becomes characterized as sinner or saint, and it reveals a great deal of depth in Cantet's material.

Cantet keeps the camera on a tight leash, rarely venturing outside Bégaudeau's classroom. The little history we are given about the students is delivered in boyish braggadocio, excited chatter, and whispered rumors. At one point, a gaggle of Bégaudeau's students bully the teacher by berating him about a popular rumor that he's gay. Thanks to Cantet's unrelenting focus, we are never told if Bégaudeau is gay, a Sarkozy supporter, or has a German granduncle who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Later on, it's the violent outburst of one of François' more outspoken students that becomes a concern, prompting a meeting over possible expulsion. Accompanied by a mother who can speak only scattered French phrases, the student becomes the lynchpin of the movie when it is argued whether or not he should be kicked out of the school. This orderly tribunal allows for high-minded debate between François and his colleagues, but the teacher gets the business from his students. Hopelessly unable to find common ground, Bégaudeau and his fiery teens allow for one of the more simple and engaging looks at the victories and turmoils of democracy to ever be put on the screen.

Though its ideas on the political majority prove fascinating and hugely entertaining, it's ultimately the film's clashing concern over education that elevates The Class from simple intrigue to a work of fervent discourse. Bégaudeau attempts to teach the students through classical texts, including The Diary of Anne Frank, but he is consistently overcome by a rambunctious, Internet-educated culture. So weak is Bégaudeau's own confidence in classical teaching that when one of his more sassy students quotes Plato's Republic, he is completely dumbfounded. Similar is Cantet's reaction to the hyper-modern, surprisingly well-rounded discussions that the kids often initiate, discussions in which François is scrambling simply to keep up. It begs the question: What shall we do if the teachers are the ones who need a better education?

Aka Entre les murs.



The heads of the class.

Gomorrah

A mob film that's as far from the genre's standard operating procedure as could be imagined, Gomorrah paints a bleak and impressionistic picture of a society not just riddled with gangsters, but crippled by them. Not only are the gangsters shown here resolutely unglamorous, they're disloyal, cowardly, and frequently downright stupid; if there were any cops around in this world, these guys wouldn't last a day. But the Neapolitan towns the film sets itself in seem hardly the kind of place capable of mustering a vigorous law enforcement response to the random brutality and open-air drug markets. Instead, the society appears little more than a host body for the Camorra (the particularly thuggish Neapolitan version of the Mafia), existing only to provide more euros for the weekly take and bodies for the slaughter.

Based on the nonfiction book by Roberto Saviano, Matteo Garrone's film -- a huge hit in its native Italy and Gran Prix winner at Cannes -- doesn't try to establish any empathetic connection to its characters, rare for journalistic cinema of this kind. Instead, Garrone works overtime to distance the viewer from the sadistic toughs and clueless young recruits he portrays, which helps the film's 100-proof venom to go down straight.

Split into five different narratives that share little but a general setting, and shot in a disconcertingly spooky docudrama manner (if there were such a thing as gothic cinema verite, this would be it) Gomorrah is a fractured experience right from the beginning. Characters are hurled at the viewer in such a tangle, utterly shorn of context or even background music, that one is a good half-hour in before the storylines begin to unravel. They're mostly the kind of stories about day-to-day Camorra life that one might expect. There are the two young punks obsessed with Scarface (the international criminal-artistic common denominator) who start pulling their own scams, only to fall afoul of the local boss. Or the young innocent who tragically graduates from grocery delivers to gang lookout.

But while these plots have a dirty poignancy of their own, it's the screenplay's more offbeat stories that are the most affecting. In one, a tailor whose boss owes money to the Camorra, freelances at night teaching in a factory full of Chinese workers busy turning out designer knockoffs. Another has a young initiate being schooled by a gentlemanly older gangster on the fine art of procuring toxic waste and dumping it in resolutely unsafe sites -- not only a huge money-maker for the Camorra but a massive, ticking, cancerous, environmental time bomb for Italy -- at one point even using clueless young children to drive the contaminated trucks.

Most other films would utilize the courtly man to symbolize some false image of an idealized earlier gangster, holding the line against the barbarians of today. But as Gomorrah makes clear over and again, this is not an organization with any need for romantic notions of honor. They exist only to make money off anything possible, whether it's fake designer goods, drug dealing, robbery, extortion, or hurling barrels of carcinogens into the ground where they can leach into the water supply. It's a million dirty little scams that, all taken together, appear to squeeze out the opportunity for any legitimate society to function.

Gomorrah is the mob movie as postapocalyptic warning, shot with dark precision inside dingy and overcrowded apartment complexes whose crumbling concrete and peeling paint make a mockery of the beautiful landscape outside. There's an echo here of J.G. Ballard's fiction, with dead-eyed little street punks making life-or-death decisions with a shrug amidst the rubble.

The film's sprawling length and stately pacing can make some parts of it tough going. But Garrone builds his momentum in masterful fashion, building towards the film's sad, devastating finale with jabs of jolting bloodshed and arbitrary tragedy. The fact that he does it all without for a second exploiting, City of God-style, any of the violence depicted, is all the more impressive.

Aka Gomorra.



The new Cosa Nostra.

Cargo 200

The lone indie release to butt heads this weekend with Edward Zwick's shallowly-scripted Defiance -- a revival of Nicholas Ray's lost technicolor opus Bigger Than Life not withstanding -- Cargo 200, the latest from Russian crime artisan Aleksei Balabanov, trades in the hired-gun thrills of the director's popular Brother trilogy for a highball of venomous gallows humor and satiric perversity.

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

As the professor goes ten rounds with the distiller over the existence of the Almighty, Valera (Leonid Bichevin) steps out on his fiancé with her friend Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova). A few spins at the discotheque, a long swig of booze and a quick hook-up later, the two are on their way to Valera's uncle's house to get "the good stuff." In classic interlocking fashion, the uncle happens to be the Commie-baiting distiller who has just sent the professor on his way home. Valera passes out on the floor while all the men begin to leer at his lady fair. It's the farmer's friend Zhurov (Aleksei Poluyan, a natural, plain-faced deviant), a Captain in the Party, who shoots the servant only moments before he forces poor Angelica to get on all fours and penetrates her with an empty bottle.

What at first appears to be a moderate Red remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quickly impregnated with satirical lunacy so grim that one might call it Russia's answer to American Psycho. Valera, an embodiment of yearning bourgeois ethos with his CCCP t-shirt already looking vintage, ditches the scene while Angelica becomes a "love" slave for Zhurov and the distiller goes down for his servant's murder. One of film's culminating images, a naked Angelica wailing, handcuffed to a bed and surrounded by a swarm of black flies and rotting corpses, is so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP.

Merciless in his eccentric brutality, Balabanov pirouettes on the line between dissent and patriotism. Made as a reaction to a burgeoning nostalgia for the days of wine and Bolsheviks, Cargo 200 is minor and discombobulated by its own outrage, but it is that very same outrage that gives it its rabid urgency. That the film flourishes from controlled dread to flailing hysteria and finally lands at its ominous (or is that hopeful?) coda is thanks to Balabanov's focus even in the most hectic of scenarios. More engaging and effective than its French equivalent (Frontier(s)), Cargo 200 sees the emergence of wicked days to come in the eyes of the erstwhile Union that, between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Gorbachev's mid-'80s perestroika, found itself without leaders, hope, or conscience.

Aka Gruz 200.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

To a film critic, the mainstream is like a ravenous shark with a defective hypothalamus. As long as Hollywood seeds the entertainment waters with chum, the masses will feed and feed until their dead, lifeless eyes roll back in their head. Examples of this baffling binge and purge are released every year -- inexplicable, unexplainable crowd-pleasers like Wild Hogs, Norbit, and Night at the Museum. Now comes Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the even louder, more obnoxious sequel to Dreamworks' loud, obnoxious CG original. This is a film about more: More already dated pop culture references, more digitally-rendered eye candy, more abject pandering to a seemingly easy-to-satisfy demographic.

After being stranded on the tiny, titular African island, our four heroes -- egomaniacal lion Alex (Ben Stiller), hypochondriac giraffe Melmen (David Schwimmer), smart alecky zebra Marty (Chris Rock), and lovelorn hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) -- are finally headed home. On a junk airplane refurbished by those pesky penguins, self-proclaimed King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen), along with his right-hand advisor Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) will take the quartet back to New York. Of course, things don't go as planned, and everyone ends up in the middle of a wildlife preserve in Africa. There, Alex meets up with his dad (Bernie Mac), mom (Sherrie Shepherd), and conniving Uncle Makunga (Alec Baldwin). When the fun-loving feline fails at the tribe's right of passage, however, it's clear these big city critters need to get back to Manhattan, and fast.

Like being beaten over the head with a bag of frosting-covered baby bunnies, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is so cutesy pie relentless it puts the Terminator to shame. This is a big screen experience so kid-oriented it should come with a pacifier and a selection of Huggies. It goes for the easy, unimaginative laughs and then barely succeeds at finding said funny business. Instead, it supports the cackles from chaos theory of comedy. Just scream and yell a lot while offering a great deal of visual busy work and baby's tiny brain will bray with manipulated happiness. As part of this year's pack of computer generated cartoons, it can't compare to Kung Fu Panda or Wall-E. In fact, it doesn't even compete with The Lion King, the 2D Disney delight from which Escape 2 Africa cribs most of its plot.

And this doesn't even begin to address the inappropriate nature of some of the material. The sexualization of cartoon animals hasn't been this blatant since Bugs Bunny gussied up to seduce Elmer Fudd, and do we really need to see a female hippo get horny over a possible hunky partner? Or how about a penguin's unnatural lust for a dashboard ornament? Even worse, danger is everpresent here, whether it's from poachers, volcanoes, drought, misguided sea creatures, or a little old lady who beats the living snot out of the characters every chance she gets (the most deplorable element of this shrill spectacle). Why PETA wastes its time protesting the Olsen twins and not taking on Madagascar's animal bashing is a mystery.

Still, if it makes the wee ones happy and keeps their parents at bay, no one will really complain. Madagascar 2 will make money, and the cast will reconvene in a couple of years to make the already unnecessary three-quel. At least there is no questioning the visual approach; the movie looks amazing. As an example of the technological leaps and bounds the genre has experienced, the images are astounding. But this is a movie relying on its wit, not its vistas, to keep audiences interested. In that regard, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa plays it safe. It's the viewer who'll be sorry.



Your table will be ready in 15 minutes.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the latest film by Kevin Smith and, for better or for worse, it's the same movie the 38-year-old New Jersey native has been making for the last 14 years. That isn't to say there aren't changes. The setting is no longer his beloved hometown and the characters, though certainly of the same mindset, are not members of the director's View Askew universe. There is also the matter of Seth Rogen who constitutes, with the lone exception of Ben Affleck, the only bona fide movie star Smith has cast in a leading role to date. That being said, I'm sure Rogen would let out a chuckle at the thought of himself as any sort of star.

As with most of the filmmaker's oeuvre, all you need to know is in the title. Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are best friends, living together and working crap jobs in Pittsburgh. They barely make rent and often substitute frivolous pleasures like sex toys and hockey skates in lieu of water and heat. It's at a high school reunion that they reconnect with Miri's high-school crush Bobby Long (Brandon Routh of Superman Returns) and his lover (Justin Long), both gay porn stars earning six-digit incomes in Los Angeles. At a bar afterwards, Zack realizes that a similar career path would solve Miri's and his financial troubles.

Employing his co-worker Delaney (the great Craig Robinson) as a producer and his hockey teammate Deacon (Jeff Anderson) as DP, Zack begins casting his film with the likes of stripper Stacey (real life porn starlet Katie Morgan), a theater actor (Ricky Mabe), a woman who can blow bubbles out of her nether regions (Traci Lords), and Lester (Jason Mewes), a man who can reach full erection in three seconds. Trouble lurks its head, though, when Zack and Miri do a scene together and things get all warm and gooey. For clarification, I'm talking about emotions.

Smith has said many times that a recurring theme in his films is the difference between having sex and making love. Zack and Miri boldfaces that thesis, but it's also a scrappy fable about independent filmmaking, both in perception and production. Making movies has always been a dirty business, but it looks clean in the end. Independent features aren't afforded the luxury of the buff and shine. By equating it with the lowest and cheapest (not to mention most profitable) form of filmmaking, Smith debases the self-importance of independent filmmaking while simultaneously creating a very entertaining indie rom-com.

As a filmmaker, Smith can be earnest and hectic, but he's an extremely talented screenwriter and he's always picked able comic talent to smooth out his heart-on-sleeve mannerisms. Rogen, who came to Hollywood as a Smith fanboy, brings along many of the tropes of his Apatow clan, but he fits with Smith's crew beautifully; his sharp, chummy sarcasm fits just as well with Mewes and Anderson as it has with Peter Segal and Jonah Hill. But, with the exception of chronic scene-stealer Robinson, this is Banks' show. The soon-to-be Laura Bush (in W.) has a lush, fickle voice that accents her sharp timing and emotional range. She matches Rogen's sailor's mouth, note for note, but she also possesses a graceful subtlety that is vital to Miri's growing feelings for Zack. Though she tends towards flighty characters, Banks's talents reach beyond levity.

Though it tends towards the inconsequential, Zack and Miri finds Smith more consistent than many of his contemporaries, especially in terms of focus. There are some minor problems: his wont to crank '90s alt-rock at every given moment often dismantles his tone, and the film's penultimate gross-out (you'll know it when you see it) seems oddly out-of-place. These are things that trouble his craft but Smith's greatest asset has always been his sincerity, and underneath all the bodily fluid, Zack and Miri are the porn-loving, alcoholic lovebirds we all hope still exist. Just, ya know, without the stains.



What do you mean, "Herpes"?

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Among the many fascinating things about the HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is its withering scorn for the jackal-like press packs that surrounded Polanski throughout the legal ordeal he went through in Los Angeles in 1977-1978. What's fascinating is how positively quaint and charming it all seems compared to the world we live in today. What would happen if an A-list movie director drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl in Jack Nicholson's Jacuzzi in today's media environment? It would be all TMZ, Perez Hilton, and cable punditry all the time.

Of course, the press wasn't Polanski's biggest problem at the time. The documentary indicts the legal system itself, and especially the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband, whose reputation is dragged through the mud here. It would be fascinating to hear his response were he still alive. In his place, we get detailed recollections from police investigators, attorneys from both sides, and the victim herself. (Polanski, however, did not participate.)

It was young Samantha Gailey who agreed to do the Jacuzzi photo shoot with Polanski, and her report of what happened that day is what got him arrested. Initially laughing it off as a prudish reaction from a girl who seemed "to know what she was doing," Polanski was soon deep in it as the press villainized him, explored the various "perversions" of his life and films, and reopened old wounds about the shocking murder of his lovely wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family eight years earlier. What was up with this short, creepy European with the beady eyes and the funny accent?

A Holocaust survivor who had found salvation through film and had become the hottest director in town with such hits as Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, Polanski was soon persona non grata, bouncing from hearing to hearing as Judge Rittenband looked for a way to get him into prison as soon as possible, eventually accepting a guilty plea on a single charge as a go-ahead to commit Polanski to 90 days of psychological testing to see if he had a social disorder. The documentary lets both the district attorney and Polanski's lawyer expound in depth on Rittenband's treacherous tactics and his concern about protecting his reputation above all else. So dismayed were the two opponents that they eventually found themselves meeting in the courthouse hallway to discuss ways to get Rittenband thrown off the case.

Fearful that the spiteful Rittenband had even more incentive to lock him away with a stiffer sentence when he was released after just 42 days and enjoyed the freedom to travel to Europe to work on a new picture, Polanski eventually ditched his last courtroom appearance and flew off to France, never to return. He's been there ever since, flourishing and even winning an Oscar for directing The Pianist.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired doesn't forgive Polanski for his crimes. Instead, it makes the case that no matter what happened, it was clear from day one that with that judge and in that environment, Polanski could never have gotten fair treatment. That being the case, the film goes easy on Polanski for running away and choosing exile over uncertain justice. It's a great and somewhat Kafkaesque story that Polanski might have enjoyed directing... had it been fiction.



Dead or alive!