It’s really hard to say something new about a divisive film like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, especially when you’re writing about it ten years after its release.

The fact is, that there are very few films of its ilk.  Boasting some of the best visuals of the past decade and a visual style all its own, Sky Captain is one of those films that you either love or hate.

Though critics seemed to mostly give it positive reviews (72% on Rotten Tomatoes), most users disliked the film (46%).  Most of my friends have never heard of Sky Captain, and after explaining a bit about the film, they seem uninterested.

I’m pretty sure they’re wrong, and here’s why.

Joseph “Sky Captain” Sullivan really loves his airplane, a modified P-40 Warhawk.  He stresses over its condition constantly, grimacing every time it takes the smallest hint of damage.  It’s a safe and familiar environment in which he can accomplish fantastic things.  In much the same way, director Kerry Conran feels safe and familiar within the realm of classic science fiction, and uses the genre to its fullest potential in a number of innovating ways to create one of my favorite films.

Shot entirely on a soundstage using mostly bluescreen to fill in the environments, Sky Captain is a study in making a film almost entirely digital with the exception of live actors.  Written and directed by Conran, Sky Captain is an homage to science fiction, comic books, and the radio broadcasts of the 1930’s and ‘40’s.

One of the really great things with this film is its stylization and the usage of technology to create the world of the film.  As mentioned previously, the entire film was shot on a soundstage, mostly with bluescreen. While some may see this as the beginning of the death of practical special effects and set building, it’s amazing to see how, even in 2004, such a feat was possible.  The only parts of the film that weren’t digitally created were some sets, and the actors themselves.  In crowds, extras were shot on the soundstage, and added in as needed in a number of places.  This gives the film a very comic book-y feel in comparison to other films.

The film is based on a six-minute short by Conran, titled The World of Tomorrow in which some flying robots attack New York City.  When director Jon Avnet saw the film, he agreed to produce the film, and when the short was shown to Gwyneth Paltrow, she immediately volunteered for the film at a lower rate than usual.  Centering around Sullivan and reporter Polly Perkins (Paltrow), the duo uncover and attempt to stop a secret plot by the director of the mysterious Unit 11, Dr. Totenkopf (represented by deceased film star Sir Laurence Olivier, brought to life through the usage of archival footage) or risk the end of the world and all life as we know it.

Speaking of the feel and style of the film, comic books are the perfect analogy here.  There’s a few scenes towards the beginning, especially that give a feel of comic books brought to life, for example the crowd pointing towards the sky at the invading robots, or policemen raising their Tommy guns to defend New York, both in a group of three, one after the other.  It’s noticeable enough to be iconic, and becomes a sort of repeated visual motif throughout the film in different ways.  Additionally, the film is in color, however, it’s colorized and filtered in such a way that it looks like an old photograph, with lots of fade, and each object in the frame has a “glow” about it.  It looks like a classic science fiction film from the 1950’s and I love every minute of it.  Everything from the costumes, to the dialog, to the design of the gadgets and robots in the film screams classic science fiction from this film.  It’s an homage.  A labor of love.

Finally, one of the great things about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the sheer number of nods to other works within the film.  A few of the bigger ones are Polly’s line “They’re crossing Sixth Avenue… Fifth Avenue… they’re a hundred yards away…” which is a direct quote from Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast hoax, the oversize radio tower when a distress message is sent to Sky Captain is a direct reference to now-defunct RKO studios, a picture of Godzilla in a brief glimpse of a Japanese newspaper, and the numbers “1138” in homage to George Lucas (whose first film was called THX 1138, and who later used the number in a variety of other ways in his other films).  The list goes on, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t.  The laundry list of classic references by the filmmakers shows the true amount of fan service present in Sky Captain, and makes the film that much more enjoyable for the style espoused in this film.

It’s not the greatest film of all time, but despite having such a poor popular response, and a mixed critical response, as a genre piece, I believe that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is worthy of the title “guilty pleasure” for many.

Except in my case, there’s nothing guilty about it at all.

Today’s Overlooked Movie comes from Will Dawson, a longtime Scene-Stealers pal and author of the blog View From Across the Pond. It’s a tribute to the late Bob Hoskins, and the only film that earned him an Academy Award nomination. Here’s Will:

Directed by Neil Jordan and released in 1986, Mona Lisa tells the story of George (Hoskins), a small time hood who has just been released from prison.  As a reward for keeping his mouth shut about his boss Denny (Michael Caine), George is given the job of being the chauffeur for high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson).

Throughout the course of the movie, George becomes memorized by Simone and attempts to help find a girl that Simone used to look after.  As George is pulled more into Simone’s world, the lines between perception and reality become blurred, and the truth is nothing what George thinks it is.

The title of the film Mona Lisa makes completely perfect sense due to the audience’s perception.  Like George, the audience does not know whether or not Simone is working with George because she loves him, or using him to satisfy her own ends.  While the truth of Simone’s intentions becomes known in the climax, the fact that George (and by extension the audience) are putting their own interpretations on what Simone’s personality should be is an excellent choice of screenwriting by Neil Jordan.  The song “Mona Lisa” by Nat King Cole also reinforces this idea with the lines “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?”: Is Simone this real person who George thinks she is? Or is she a distant person who is using George to her own ends?

Of course, this theme of the film would be remiss without mentioning the incredible performances of all the leads.  Michael Caine is great as the villainous Denny, and Cathy Tyson is incredible as Simone, but the person who stands out is Hoskins as George.  Hoskins infuses George with the right level of pathos and grit.

You can see in Hoskins’ performance that he is a good man trying to find his place in the world, but is constantly used and abused by the person he lives and trusts.  In the hands of a lesser actor, the role could easily have been one-note, but Hoskins takes this role and makes it a tour-de-force performance.  It is not a surprise that Hoskins was nominated for Best Actor for this role, but it is a surprise that he did not win (losing to Paul Newman and his sympathy Oscar for The Color of Money).  But just ignore that fact and look at the Hoskins’ performance for what it is: About a man who is trying to get back on the straight and narrow, but is constantly betrayed by the person he loves.

Featuring an interesting theme, great performances, and incredible directing, Mona Lisa is a great film to not only view great acting, but also what a great film should be.  Be prepared to listen to the Nat King Cole song “Mona Lisa” and look at the painting by Da Vinci to further appreciate the film.

Fun Fact: This movie has Robbie Coltrane as George’s friend who loves mystery novels and plastic spaghetti.  In this reviewer’s opinion, any Robbie Coltrane is always a good thing in any movie.

The trajectory of the Godzilla filmography is ongoing, shifting between nuclear metaphor and more standard daikaiju material–once defiled by an American studio and currently in the process of being rebooted with next year’s film from Legendary.

But 20 years after the release of the original version–a bleak and serious horror incarnation, ironically the progenitor of a genre that mostly skirted its roots in years to come (not unlike the Godzilla series itself)–Toho released Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, perhaps the ultimate iteration (and logical culmination) of the character after two decades of material.

As beloved as the American side of the monster movie genre had been, with Ray Harryhausen following in the footsteps of Willis O’Brien, crafting decades of iconic stop-motion creatures (beginning in 1925 with The Lost World and by extension King Kong in 1933, and ending roughly 50 years later with Clash of the Titans in 1981), the sheer scale and scope of the Japanese movement from Gojira (1954) on set it apart in a number of ways.

Where stop-motion animation approximated movement more fluidly and with a broader range of detail, speed and weight were always more convincing with the suit-mation employed in the kaiju era. The restrictiveness of the costumes, particularly in the case of Godzilla, enhanced the plodding, methodical posture and movements of the creatures that were actually more in line with the reality of the physics of something that size.

In the case of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, it afforded Toho an opportunity for some of the best costume work of the entire series. Godzilla appears better than ever, with two separate costumes used in the film, and endures an astronomical amount of blood loss in both encounters with the title villain. The mammalian daikaiju King Caesar (see-saw) is another sound creation,  a kind of demonic Sphinx with an unmistakable Cowardly Lion-vibe hatched from a mountain by a protracted musical number. Nothing’s perfect.

But Mechagodzilla is of course the central creation–my vote for the best of the first run, and a candidate for best of the entire series. A massive robot built to mirror Godzilla’s appearance, set loose by alien invaders hellbent on colonizing the planet, its metal plating and ubiquitous gadgetry are incredibly well realized, and the FX for lasers and force fields on display are some of the best of all tokusatsu of that period.

The followup in 1975 pitted an additional enemy against Godzilla, lost King Caesar as an ally, and toned down some of the more outlandish elements of the Space Ape alien invaders–still sheathed in chrome jumpsuits though no longer reverting to gorilla form when injured or killed, for example. After that film, Godzilla would go on hiatus until the mid-80s, spawning an additional set of separate series, punctuated by an American abortion in 1998.

At the end of the day, the evolution from Hiroshima parable to science fiction anti-hero was mostly successful, and struck a kind of sublime balance with Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. The B-movie sci-fi angle of the back story integrated into the basic dynamic of Godzilla fighting other monsters (itself a B-movie sci-fi angle) pays off in a way almost no other entry does on either side. Ironically, the ultimate example of that cartoon flexibility being Mechagodzilla itself.

A reasonable person can make a case for humanoid mechas presented in the likes of Pacific Rim or its predecessors, but the fact of the matter is the construction of a robot made to look like Godzilla is insane. I understand they wanted to frame him for property damage, and I appreciate the Terminator-style reveal with the iconic score more than most, but let’s be serious: The later appearances still work because of built-in, genre-specific reasons, and because the technology had stagnated in many ways. This is a creation preserved for its era, and that’s not a bad thing.

Anniversaries are hit and miss in the Godzilla universe, but this overlooked entry (obscured by remakes and awkward chronological positioning) is one of the best. It crystallizes an era and bygone approach to film making, with a technical sophistication and entertainment value outclassed by few of its contemporaries.

Note: A mutual friend of Eric’s and mine asked us on Twitter to convince a buddy of hers to watch Freaks and Geeks. As Eric noted, 140 characters doesn’t do the series justice, so I sent said Freaks and Geeks holdout this e-mail. It has been edited because of my tendency to make embarrassing typos.

Dear Angela:

As the proud owner of a box set of the entire series (1999-2000), Freaks and Geeks delights me in ways that few television shows have ever managed to do. It’s a smart look at youngsters who often make stupid choices. In one season, the show’s creator Paul Feig takes viewers through a remarkably complicated story that grows and changes with each episode. Thankfully, with a lone season, you won’t have to watch years of installments to see it all.

As with Mad Men or Downton Abbey, there is something to pulls viewers back from episode to episode. Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) and her little brother Sam (John Francis Daley) aren’t your typical sitcom high school misfits.

They and the other kids in their Detroit high school develop as the series does. Characters we liked in the beginning shock us by acting badly, and characters we underestimated prove themselves far more worthy that we initially imagined them to be. Feig feels a kinship with these young characters, and even the bullies occasionally seem human.

For example, Sam Weir actually has a few dates with the beautiful girl he’s only seen from afar. Most storylines would end there. With Freaks and Geeks, however, the two gradually discover that being in an actual relationship can be just as stressful and heartbreaking as rejection and that attraction and compatibility are two separate entities.

There are plenty of laughs in the series, but they come from different places than they do in most TV comedies. The laugh track has been eliminated, and you won’t miss it because you’ll be giggling just fine on your own.

The characters have the sort of fragmented conversations people have in real life, although there aren’t the grunts and groans and “ums” you’ll hear in a Twilight movie.

I once had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Feig, and he said that some of the best laugh lines can be an “um” or a simply glance of disbelief. Freaks and Geeks consistently proves his point. Many of the disposable sitcoms with their telegraphed punchlines aren’t half as funny as what Feig and his partner in crime Judd Apatow (who produced and wrote and directed some episodes) deliver here.

As someone who felt sentenced to high school, the series reminds me of why I hated it and how my decision making wasn’t that great back then. I won’t say that you’ll see yourself in Freaks and Geeks because everyone’s high school experience is different. Instead, I’ll say the world in the series is consistently dynamic and believable as 1980 Detroit.

While the series itself is both finely crafted art and rousing entertainment, it’s also a fascinating glimpse at some budding talent who later hit the big time, proving that network suits are as shortsighted as they are free of the ravages of taste or intelligence.

Not convinced? Here’s Episode 1 in its entirety:

One of the most underrated and overlooked movies of last year is now out on Blu-ray.

Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s strange and clever dark comedy Seven Psychopaths sank like a stone at the box office, just like his last effort, In Bruges. But that one turned into a cult hit on home video, so I’m expecting the same thing for the similarly twisted Seven Psychopaths.

Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken are laugh-out-loud funny as dog-nappers who become intertwined with fledgling screenwriter Colin Farrell, but a plot synopsis beyond that doesn’t do the film justice.

Seven Psychopaths tests the boundaries of narrative coherency, flying gloriously off the rails as it plays gleefully with genre expectations. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen next, and it’s absolutely thrilling.

In my original review, I praised Rockwell and Walken, both overlooked for acting awards this year, by saying: “Rockwell and Walken are the standouts here, both riotously funny but in completely different ways. Rockwell is a manic mess, constantly running at the mouth and serving as some sort of stand-in for the tastes of the mainstream action crowd. Walken is his calm, reasoned counterpoint. He delivers deadpan line after deadpan line with the world-weariness of a man who’s lived a life that would make most crime movie fans blush.”

Now here’s where I start to get angry.

A movie this complicated, this layered, and this far-out absolutely deserves a full-on DVD/Blu-ray package chock full of informative extras that illuminate the themes from the film.

Unfortunately, what Sony Pictures gives us is a bunch of tossed-off interview snippets and EPK material, most of which you can probably find on YouTube. ACTUALLY, YOU CAN. SO … just to prove how lame they are, I’ve embedded them all below. It’s all marketing materials. There’s a two-minute featurette, an interview with Colin Farrell, one with Woody Harrelson, a 2-minute bit on the film’s locations, a silly attempt to market the movie (which I’ll agree is unmarketable, and gloriously so) using the Internet “cat craze,” and something called “Layers,” a one-minute clip package under a Rockwell beatbox beat that has no clear point other than to be annoying.

Seven Psychopaths deserved better.

Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths

Colin Farrell is Marty

Woody Harrelson is Charlie

Crazy Locations

Seven Psychocats

Layers 

With director Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty release date approaching and Halloween right on our heels, today’s Overlooked Movie takes a look at an early movie in Bigelow’s career, the underrated vampire flick Near Dark.

The 1980s seemed to exist in a vast ocean of cheesy vampire flicks. Movies like Once Bitten, Vamp, and Fright Night were popping up left and right, and the quality of each varied dramatically.

The best known in this quasi-category is probably The Lost Boys, the only Joel Schumacher film to date that I have any affection for, and it arrived in theaters the same year as today’s overlooked movie, Near Dark. The basic premise of each was remarkably similar: attractive young man (Caleb in Near Dark and Michael in The Lost Boys) gets lured into a group of fringe-dwelling vampires by an attractive young woman (Mae in Near Dark and Star in The Lost Boys) and his life is thrown into upheaval as a result. However, the similarities end there. There’s a stark difference between the two in terms of style, setting, tone, and overall execution that makes them worthy companion pieces and not vacuous competitors. (I’m looking at you, Armageddon and Deep Impact.)

The Lost Boys had a lighter touch, relied more on comedy, and played pretty much by the basic rules of movie vampirism. Also, it happily and freely used the word “vampire,” going so far as to have local slayers recommend vampire comic books as makeshift survival guides.

Conversely, Near Dark was darker and slightly more existential, with black humor and considerably greater violence, and no interest in adhering to the traditional rules of vampire cinema laid out by countless predecessors. No stakes through the heart or defensive crucifixes, here, and apart from their blood thirst and aversion to sunlight, the vampires in this film are undefined. They’re never identified as vampires and have more in common with the marauding sociopaths of The Devil’s Rejects than they do with Nosferatu.

Another important distinction between the two is a detail that actually becomes paradoxical within Near Dark. As Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) and Mae (Jenny Wright) stare up at the sky and hone in on the stillness of the night, the pathos and majesty of eternal life manifest as Mae tells Caleb she’ll still be around when the light from a distant star finally reaches the planet. It’s a haunting moment elevated to transcendent by the score from Tangerine Dream. With sparse, mournful airs bellowing on a synthesizer seemingly adjusted for deep space, the never ending future seems cold and lonely and inexplicable.

When I first saw the film, I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but I knew that I was moved in some capacity by that sequence. And so it stands to reason that my only real complaint about it is that it lets its vampires off the hook of their doom much, much too easily and undercuts some of the power that sequence conveyed. A fairly simple medical procedure is all it takes to return a vampire to his or her human form, and that fact has consequences for the philosophical implications and efficacy of the film.

The first thing it does is tell us that there’s nothing supernatural about vampirism. It doesn’t specify what it is, but we can assume that it’s a biochemical aberration caused by an infection and not a spiritual one with demonic origins. The second thing it does is take something away from the haunting beauty of the immortality associated with vampirism that the film established so well in its opening scenes.

On the one hand, I appreciate that with this detail they’re able to sidestep the “kill the head vampire” trope because it’s ubiquitous in films of this sort (Lost Boys comes to mind) and so slightly less dramatically compelling. On the other, I find it disenchanting that something so frightening and sacrosanct can be embraced and rejected through such relatively simple means.

It’s an odd situation. The film does a better job crystallizing eternity than just about any other vampire film I’ve seen, and yet, before all’s said and done, it chips away at that crystallization by solving its biggest problem far too easily. I guess the sacrifice of resonance for originality is an essential compromise.

The vampires in the film are played by James Cameron regulars Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein, in addition to Joshua Miller, the son of Jason Miller (The Exorcist) and brother of Jason Patric, who, coincidentally, starred in The Lost Boys, this film’s aforementioned timely and topical counterpart. As Severen, Bill Paxton is particularly engaging and his antics add a completely different dimension to the film. By “antics,” I mean slaughter. And by “slaughter,” I mean widespread gory demises of minor characters delivered with the personal touch of the 1980s Bill Paxton prototype.

The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, would go on to become the first female recipient of the Academy Award for Best Director in motion picture history for The Hurt Locker. While this film was certainly no harbinger of things to come, it showed in the young filmmaker an effortless command of elaborate action sequences and a palpable inventiveness that permeated them. Take a look at the motel shoot out in broad daylight and you can see notes of technique that would be employed later on.

And in addition to those technicalities, the burnt-out western landscapes and the dodgy bars and motels visited throughout create an exacting sense of time and place. It’s murky and dusty and exhausting, but ultimately rewarding.

Rarely does a movie come along that that tackles a polarizing issue in a seemingly unobtrusive way.

What is so surprising about Robert M. Young‘s 1977 film ¡Alambrista! (The Illegal) is that it follows the journey of a Mexican illegal immigrant with as little sentimentalization as possible, and proves as potent and relevant today as it was 35 years ago.

Now that The Criterion Collection has given a full restoration to this overlooked movie, more people can appreciate ¡Alambrista! and understand a little-seen side of a hot-button political issue with more depth and clarity — and a focus on the experience itself, not the talking points.

After making the 1973 short documentary Children of the Fields about a family of migrant farmworkers (which is included on the newly issued Criterion DVD and Blu-ray), writer/director/cinematographer Young decided to pursue a similar subject matter for his first foray into feature filmmaking. His documentary background gave Young the experience needed to lend a sense of realism to ¡Alambrista!, which he wrote in six weeks.

Roberto Ramírez (Domingo Ambriz in a performance that resonates with authenticity) plays a husband who leaves Mexico after the birth of his child in hopes of making money in America to bring back home and support his family. Young employs a hand-held camera and low angles, getting up close to Roberto so that the audience feels as though his experience is their own.

Inherently, this takes a certain amount of objectivity away, but Young’s film is clearly a humanistic treatment of the issue. The film must be considered a grandchild of the Italian neorealism movement, even if much if its 16mm cinematography is strikingly beautiful in color.

The story soon becomes one of survival, as he endures and escapes one random set of dire circumstances after another without feeling contrived or stopping for cheap sentimental tricks. Roberto even makes a certain selfish choice, but at the time, after what he’s been through, who could blame him?

Roberto speaks no English and there are big stretches of the movie where he doesn’t speak at all. This causes us to further identify with him and it makes the moments of chaos and confusion come alive. ¡Alambrista! is an intimate film, mixing in non-actors in actors in situations that rarely feel scripted.

The most invasive scenes come when Young uses rock music to punctuate montages or transitions, as well as a restored moment where one of Roberto’s traveling companions (Trinidad Silva) puts both their lives in danger in an act of stupid desperation.

Linda Gillin is particularly low-key and effective as a diner waitress that helps Roberto out, and Edward James Olmos and Ned Beatty each make cameo appearances that are mildly distracting now, due mostly to them being recognizable actors.

The movie was broadcast by PBS in 1977, and in 1978, ¡Alambrista! won the inaugural Camera d’Or Award (for Best First Feature Film) at the Cannes Film Festival, but it never received a theatrical release in the U.S.  In 2004, Young re-edited the film for a multimedia educational project, and that is the version presented on this Criterion edition.

Besides the Children of the Fields short, the Criterion Blu-ray contains an interview with Olmos, and introduction from Young, and feature-length commentary from Young and coproducer Michael Hausman.

Maybe it’s a little early to call Goon overlooked, but considering the movie came out in January and has been available on-demand for even longer, the fact that the average moviegoer hasn’t heard of it grants it early access to this column.

The movie, a comedy from writers Evan Goldberg and Jay Baruchel, follows Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), a lovable dummy with a penchant for hitting people, who finally finds a place in the less-than-glamorous world of minor league hockey. After saving his friend, played by Baruchel, form an enraged hockey player, Doug gains a spot on his Massachusetts minor league team, where he does what he does best — break faces and hurt people.

His skills on the ice as an enforcer get him noticed by a AAA team (coached by Sons of Anarchy‘s Kim Coates) and it isn’t long before he joins a group of drunken, Percocet-abusing losers  in Halifax. Soon, Doug’s reputation gets him noticed by Ross “The Boss” Rhea, an aging enforcer set to retire at the end of his season. Rhea (played by Liev Schreiber) decides that before he retires he has to go up against Doug, and the closest thing the movie has to a conflict comes into focus during its last third.

Based on that description, Goon sounds like just about every other rag-tag, underdog sports movie and in a lot of ways it is, but there a handful of elements that separate it from more generic sports movie fare. Foremost is Scott’s performance as Doug. It’s unfortunate that he continues to be labeled as Stifler from the American Pie franchise because Scott’s work as an actor is so much better than that single role. He was terrific in Role Models, another underrated and overlooked comedy and was the only thing other than Justin Timberlake‘s surreal music video that made Southland Tales worth watching. But he’s never been better than he is here.

Doug Glatt should not be a likable character. He’s a thug. A bruiser. A guy who beats other people to a pulp and who’s sole gift is a near superhuman pain tolerance, and yet by the movie’s climax — and it’s a doozy — it’s nearly impossible not to root for him. This is due in part to Goldberg and Baruchel’s script, but Scott’s performance is also a huge factor. Not every scene works, like when he tries to explain his philosophy to his roommate toward the end, but even the rockiest moments in Goon benefit from Scott’s ability to make a guy who punches people for a living sympathetic. His ability to play Doug as dumb, but good-natured, even as he’s hurting people is no easy task, even if he makes it look that way.

Beyond that is Scott’s foil, Liev Schreiber. Schreiber steals almost every scene he’s in during the movie’s brisk, 90-minute runtime. He’s menacing, slyly funny, especially during an interaction with Scott in a coffee shop, and he’s dangerous. Early in the movie we see the offense that got him banned from the NHL — a high-sticking incident in which he threw his stick into the back of an opponent’s head after he evaded his initial assault. It’s brutal and sets the tone for just how unpredictable his character is, and continues to be, for the rest of the movie.

The grittiness of the movie’s violence and overall raunchy tone also separates it from the pack of underdog sports movies that don’t go far enough in their portrayal of second-string athletics. Like boxing, there’s a certain brutal romance in hockey. Beyond the pro players and million-dollar contracts, the guys grinding it out in the minors are doing it because 1.) they love it and 2.) they don’t know any better. But it really is a sad existence, traveling from town to town, playing half-sold out college arenas and putting their bodies through a tremendous amount of torture, and yet most players would say there’s nowhere they’d rather be than on the ice, scoring a goal or cleaning some guy’s clock to the cheers of a couple dozen people.

Goon doesn’t shy away from this. The movie focuses more on who Doug sees it, which is an opportunity to do the one thing he does well in service of a group of teammates that have his back. And because of that, it makes the comedy and the few dramatic moments even more compelling because you understand how much it means to him.

The last thing the movie really does an excellent job with is its conclusion, which builds to a brawl between Doug and Ross. I won’t spoil the outcome, but I will say that it’s simultaneously heartbreaking and satisfying. It doesn’t disappoint in any way and is the hockey equivalent of a gunfight at high noon.

Goon is an example of a genre movie done well. It’s not going to change the face of filmmaking. But like Bull Durham, Field Of Dreams, Diggstown and Slap Shot, it showcases the unsung and unlikely heroes of a sport by focusing on the heart and inevitability that comes with dedicating your life to a game. It isn’t high art, but it’s the kind of popcorn movie that you think about randomly for a few weeks after watching it. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

Kicking and Screaming wasn’t really a big hit when it came out in 2005. Maybe its because its number-one goal was to showcase its star verbally and physically abusing kids.

Kicking and Screaming may be overlooked, but it deserves a fair shake — at least partially because it’s the kind of movie aimed at kids that adults will enjoy too — especially if they ever had parents who were way too concerned with their kids winning at sports. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of the film’s snarky humor goes right over the heads of most children. But if they are like this movie’s main character, they might find out when they grow up that the effects could be permanent.

Will Ferrell stars as Phil Weston, an average suburban dad whose over-competitive father has scarred him for life. His feelings of inadequacy stem from a childhood in which he was consistently awful in sports, despite his Dad’s best efforts. Growing up, Phil was left to warm the bench while his father Buck (Robert Duvall) coached his soccer team to victory. In an early scene that sums up their relationship, Buck tells his son that he’ll get some playing time next season, but right now he’s trying to win this game.

Fast forward to the present day: Buck is still a locally renowned soccer coach and owner of a sporting goods store. He trades Phil’s 10-year old son to the last-place Tigers, and Phil is then coerced into the recently vacant head coach position.

Like most sports movies, especially ones featuring kids, Kicking and Screaming revolves around an unlikely underdog team who amazes everybody and ends up playing in the championship game. This movie is not, however, about the challenges that a bunch of cute kids overcome to win the big game.

Surprisingly, it’s a brutally absurd revenge flick that pits a mild-mannered vitamin salesman against his domineering father. The movie is no Kill Bill, but trapped inside the seemingly harmless veneer of a PG-rated kid’s movie lies a mischievous little devil of a film that is just “kicking and screaming” to get out.

Phil starts his coaching career vowing to teach the kids good values, but the team is so hopeless that he immediately begins looking for shortcuts to victory. Where most movies go straight for the feel-good situations, director Jesse Dylan (the eldest son of Bob Dylan) instead goes for the jugular, rooting the film’s nastiest comedy in Phil’s pent-up insecurities.

Although the film includes the standard scene where all the kids come together and realize that teamwork is the only way to win the big game, the script’s masterstroke is that it puts this unavoidable moment off until the last possible second. In fact, for most of the movie, Phil is a hysterical example of what a coach should absolutely not do.

One absurd idea Phil carries out is recruiting Super Bowl coach Mike Ditka, who also happens to be Buck’s bitter next-door neighbor and hated rival, as the Tigers assistant coach. Ditka plays a hilarious caricature of his own tough guy persona that matches well with Ferrell’s freewheeling, improvisational style. Once Ditka gets the caffeine-free Phil hooked on coffee, the real craziness begins.

Phil’s behavior turns from inappropriate to absurd, as he taunts the other teams by screaming “Loser!” in their faces through an orange pylon. Another bizarre and extremely funny moment has Ferrell wandering out on the field and actually pushing one of the kids down, face-first into the grass. It doesn’t look that funny on paper, but I’m chuckling to myself right now, just thinking about it.

Producer Jimmy Miller got the idea for this movie while watching Ferrell berate a little boy during a sketch on Saturday Night Live, and credit must go to him for such a simplistic and winning idea. There is something inherently amusing in watching a towering man-child like Ferrell go nuts on these kids. Writers Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick are aware that in order for the joke to work, though, Ferrell must be innocently oblivious of his attitude. Duvall wisely plays it straight, and by concentrating on Buck and Phil’s strained father/son relationship, Kicking and Screaming actually sometimes wanders beyond broad comedy into believable territory.

But let’s make no mistake. This is Ferrell’s movie. It may never really focus on the typical “kids who overcome impossible odds” motif, but who cares? Kicking and Screaming is very funny. It has more in common with Farrell’s charming Elf than with Anchorman and its complete lack of a coherent plot. Think of Kicking and Screaming as a kind of bridge between the two.

It’s about as anarchic as kids movies are allowed to get.

Judi Dench received her sixth Oscar nomination for the darkly funny oddball drama Notes on a Scandal in 2007, just as Fox Searchlight hoped she would when they released it during awards season. As an extra bonus, Cate Blanchett also received a supporting actress nomination as well — her third.

The movie went on to gross a respectable $17 million and then promptly disappeared. Notes on a Scandal, however, deserves to be remembered as something more than a typical British awards-season acting showcase. It may be the most subversive movie that either of these respected actresses has been involved in.

Sometimes being pigeonholed can be a good thing. In the last 25 years or so, we have come to expect Judi Dench to play the older lady in some  lavish period piece who bucks some kind of societal tradition in a charming, but fairly safe, manner.

So it is a pleasant surprise to see Dench be rotten and nasty in Notes on a Scandal. The wonder of her wickedly funny performance is that it also elicits so much sympathy.

The screenplay, adapted by Patrick Marber from a book by Zoë Heller, gives Judi Dench some rich material for sure. Barbara Covett (Dench) is a veteran London history teacher. She’s a loner who explains all of her deepest thoughts in a diary, which we hear as voiceover narration. A window into her damaged psyche, this establishes her ulterior motives with some of the most barbed onscreen dialogue since Marber brought Closer to the screen two years earlier.

Despite her obsessive ramblings, however (which are delivered in a jarringly unsavory tone, especially considering what one expects from Dench), Barbara still connects with the audience on the basest of levels. An older woman who lives alone with a dying cat, she understands the need for companionship more than anybody. When she cannot get it, she becomes a wild beast.

Judi Dench plays Barbara as a disciplinarian who regards her students as nothing more than a nuisance and views her job to be more sheepherder than educator. Barbara takes sick joy in watching new young art teacher Sheba (Cate Blanchett) arrive at the school filled with idealism, and looks forward to the day when her bubble will burst. She mocks her cruelly at first, but is soon attracted to Sheba’s mix of naivete and vulnerability.

Apart from its devilish tone, Notes on a Scandal also has some interesting things to say about what constitutes a relationship. It’s a given that our friends are the people we can tell our secrets to. Friends exist, after all, to support each other. But what value can one place on giving support?

As Barbara schemes in the latest volume of her seemingly never-ending diary, we realize that the elder teacher regards a secret as something more than a bond between two friends—it is a limitless supply of leverage.

Credit director Richard Eyre (Iris, Stage Beauty) for some additional subtle character-building. He gives us Barbara’s perspective throughout the movie visually as well, by fixing the camera’s gaze on Sheba’s exposed midriff or a strand of hair that falls from her head. We see the inexperienced teacher in the way Barbara does.

Blanchett is in top form as well. She radiates a natural sexuality that her character seems to be completely oblivious to. As Notes on a Scandal progresses, she’s also oblivious to Barbara’s deception, and it proves to be her undoing.

Dench’s tightly pursed face and curt manner are refreshing when most of the other teachers are bland working stiffs. It’s a guilty pleasure for us to slip into Barbara’s skin for a while and view the world through her grizzled eyes. This is especially easy to do when Sheba makes consistently bad choices, and Barbara’s pessimistic view of the school’s evils seems right on the money.

The narration has an acerbic wit that strikes a chord by saying out loud the things that we often think but would never admit to thinking.

In the film’s opening, Barbara tells us that she is often the keeper of other people’s secrets. But who keeps hers, she asks? In Notes on a Scandal, it’s the audience who keeps them and is also made culpable because of them by way of her illicit diary — and it’s a naughty, electrifying place to be.

A 15-year labor of love finally brought to the screen by director Martin Scorsese quite controversially in 1988, The Last Temptation of Christ looks radiant in a new Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. Stripping all that way, the movie is an intruiging, passionate picture that tries to bring Christ to life as a real man rather than a figurehead.

Much was made by high-profile Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson upon the movie’s release about its supposedly sacrilegious content — even though they hadn’t seen it. In fact, they withheld important information about the context of its “objectionable” material to make it seem more salacious.

What The Last Temptation of Christ does that no other movie had done before it is make Jesus seem human and relatable. Rather than portray Christ (Willem Dafoe) as a person with a benevolent perma-smile whose divine light shines 24/7 , Martin Scorsese (raised a Roman Catholic) and co-screenwriter Paul Schrader (raised as a Calvinist) dare to capture his humanity. Christ suffers crippling headaches and surreal visions on his way to divinity and the process of accepting his role (or fate) as the Savior, is fraught with doubt.

One of the most popular and wrongheaded criticisms of The Last Temptation of Christ is the fact that Judas (Harvey Keitel) speaks with a Brooklyn accent. In fact, all the characters in the film speak as people in today’s modern society speak, and I would argue that’s one of the things that make The Last Temptation of Christ so approachable. I’d also say that Keitel’s performance in particular is engaging, as he struggles with his own very personal crisis of faith.

In the enlightening commentary track, Martin Scorsese explains that the modern language and accents were kept so that the anguish and doubt of both Jesus and his apostles could be made more human. Because this is an artistic interpretation of the happenings of the New Testament and of Nikos Kazantzakis‘ novel of the same name, Scorsese wanted to distance the film as far away from other biblical epics as possible.

Watching the movie today, it absolutely holds up. The only thing that dates it are some of the 80s hairstyles and Peter Gabriel‘s haunting, yet still-very-80s-sounding score. Michael Ballhaus‘ stirring cinematography looks impressive on Blu-ray, even if there is a bit of graininess to the picture.

Of course the right-wing fundamentalists didn’t have a problem with Mel Gibson’s disgusting piece of torture porn, The Passion of the Christ (based on material from 19th-Century anti-Semitic nun Anne Catherine Emmerich), which wanted so badly to be considered the authoritative realistic depiction of Christ’s sacrifice that Gibson made all his actors speak Aramaic. Scorsese’s movie places itself at the opposite end of that spectrum: A truly personal work of art that actually could have broad appeal, especially if it didn’t have the “controversial” albatross hanging around its neck.

I’d go so far as to say that if you asked the average Christian today what it was about The Last Temptation of Christ that was so offensive, they probably couldn’t tell you. And if they were to watch it, they might get deeper insight into the one of their most cherished legends.

The extra bonus features are the same ones that appeared on Criterion’s DVD re-issue, and the commentary is the real star here:

– Audio commentary featuring Martin Scorsese, Willem Dafoe, and writers Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks

– Galleries of production stills, research materials, and costume designs

– Location production footage shot by Scorsese

– Interview with composer Peter Gabriel, with a stills gallery of traditional instruments used in the score

For another take, here’s the link to Phil Fava’s Overlooked Movie column on The Last Temptation of Christ.

This weekend, The Hunger Games cleaned up at the box office ($155 mil ain’t bad) and scored pretty high with most critics as well.

(My theory is that even though The Hunger Games has a 85% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes, each critic who reviewed the film gave it an just above-average rating, which means that everybody isn’t hogwild about it, they just all agree it didn’t suck too terribly.)

Anyway, the “battle to the death” idea is nothing new. It first appeared in 1932, when King Kong directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper brought The Most Dangerous Game to the screen.

More famously in modern times, The Running Man was a cheesy but entertaining escapade adapted from a Stephen King novel in 1987, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, María Conchita Alonso, Jesse Ventura, Jim Brown, and Richard Dawson. It was full of hilariously bad one-liners, but also featured a critique of mob mentality and populist garbage.

The movie everybody is throwing around this past weekend that is similar to The Hunger Games is Battle Royale, the twisted 2000 Japanese import that has a totalitarian state surprising a high-school class tracked my metal collars on an evacuated island as part of a military research project meant to keep the population in terror, so they would be afraid to mount an insurgency. In spirit, its the closest to The Hunger Games, but it contains a much more savage view of human nature.

A movie with that same savage view and a more pointed, precognitive satire of reality TV is Series 7: The Contenders. Way back in 2006, it topped my list of the Top 10 Most Overlooked Movies and it has yet to claim its spot atop the reality-deathgame satires as of yet. (It might have something to do with the fact that in post-9/11 2001, the social climate in the U.S. was not ready to accept a violent parody hat made us all look like idiots.)

The 2001 film Series 7: The Contenders, written and directed by Daniel Minahan (who went on to direct every HBO show in the 200s ever and is currently doing Game of Thrones), is a rough-and-tumble, badass satire of the highest degree. It’s so good I’d put it up there with Starship Troopers. And let me tell you, that’s high praise indeed.

The main reason the movie is so effective is because when you watch Series 7: The Contenders, you feel implicated. This is the one thing that The Hunger Games never got across as well as it needed to. It’s one thing to show the obvious divide between the rich and the poor and criticize the all-powerful totalitarian government, but Series 7: The Contenders makes you feel like you are a part of the problem once you become involved in the “plot” of the TV show.

“Real People in Real Danger”

The setting isn’t some grand, elaborate wilderness either. It’s trailer parks, shopping malls, convenience stores, and everywhere else where you may be hanging out at any given moment only to have your day interrupted by gunfire. These are the places that six lottery-picked ordinary Americans will duel to the death for the amusement of a national TV audience, from the most unlikely contestants (an emergency-room nurse and a pregnant woman) to the least.

Brooke Smith is commanding in the lead role as a reigning champion who will stop at nothing to survive and win. You may recognize her as the girl stuck in Buffalo Bill’s pit in The Silence of the Lambs. Here she is no less determined, but way more dangerous.

The entire movie is presented as one marathon-long version of the TV show, complete with frank interview sessions and a parody of 00s reality shows that pre-dates most of the awful TV of the decade.

In less than 90 minutes, Series 7: The Contenders crams more interesting and fully developed characters than The Hunger Games could muster in two-and-a-half hours, plus it’s plot machinations have the power to surprise.

The movie plays with the idea of instant celebrity and one’s 15 minutes of fame to an absurd level, as  one 18-year-old girl’s parents are so excited that she’s a contestant that they chauffeur her around on her way to kill other contestants. More absurdity: There’s also the inane narration (from Will Arnett, no less!)  that frames everything, reminding you whenever a “real” moment seeps through that you are watching a consciously manipulated program.

Another key element that Series 7: The Contenders gets right is that it makes the overarching theme seem personal. One of the contenders is an artist with cancer who just happens to be the pregnant lady’s first boyfriend back in high school (Glenn Fitzgerald) . Melodramatic? Sure, but it also means that this story will go beyond surface-value social criticism and have to confront its bigger issues on a personal level. It makes Series 7: The Contenders a more effective emotional journey and sets up a climax that is way more risky and dramatic than the foregone conclusion of The Hunger Games.

Series 7: The Contenders was ahead of its time in 2001, and still retains its dark and twisted no-holds-barred version of satire today. Fans of South Park will appreciate the bold story choices and the dark comedy.

If there’s one thing Series 7: The Contenders anticipated more than anything else, it’s that our media and culture would become more and more in tune with the idea that he who scores the biggest upset must be declared the winner, whether their ideas are better or not. When a debate becomes about being the quickest guy in the room to put somebody else down, it ceases to be about anything tangible; anything that matters.

In Series 7: The Contenders, that is 100 percent the case. And look where its gotten us.

Sometimes, I watch movies and just marvel at the fact that everything has been done already.

Watching the 1959 Soviet film Letter Never Sent (aka The Unsent Letter), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov and lensed by his brilliant director of photography Sergei Urusevsky, it struck me over and over again how inventive and evocative the shots were and how stale modern film language can be.

Whether its a sharply contrasted deep-focus shot with a close-up profile of a weather-beaten face (Innokenti Smoktunovsky) in the foreground and a silhouetted rescuer descending the ladder from a helicopter or a meticulously choreographed handheld shot that follows four Soviet geologists through the brush and puts you right there with them, Letter Never Sent (or Neotpravlennoye Pismo) is a visual wonder for all of its 96-minute running time.

Mikhail Kalatozov is famous for his 1957 Palme d’Or-winning war drama The Cranes Are Flying and I Am Cuba, his semi-hallucinogenic 1964 celebration of the Cuban Revolution. But Letter Never Sent is the overlooked movie that was sandwiched right in between.

What is remarkable is how quickly Letter Never Sent can whip from being a realistic survival story to an impressionistic one, sometimes within the same minute. The cinematography is also shifting POV constantly. In one frantic scene of our heroes digging desperately, it goes from menacing low-angle shots to ones that mirror the action of the pick-axes from above.

The location footage is impressive, combining artistically framed landscape shots with in-your-face close-ups of branches, smoke, and trees ,so it’s all the more noticeable (and a little jarring but no less beautiful) when it suddenly shifts to a studio-shot scene.

Narratively, Letter Never Sent is pretty weak. It begins with some onscreen propaganda titles about the noble journey of the geologists. Three men and a woman are sent into the unforgiving Siberian wilderness in search of diamonds. The leader of the group (Smoktunovsky) continues to write a letter to his wife that he didn’t get a chance to send before their last stop in civilization. As he writes, Kalatozov superimposes images of serenity and contentment that serve as a stark contrast to their surroundings.

The other three geologists are involved in a love triangle (shared by Tatyana Samoilova) that is by turns slightly tedious and uncomfortably transparent. Thankfully, Kalatozov doesn’t let it take center stage. In fact, it is just simmering below the surface of some of the scenes that are filled with the most tension.

Certainly, the group is idealistic, but their faith in the fact that their mission will bear fruit is often shaken. Eventually, just as it seems their fate has changed, it drastically changes again. Once they are faced with a far greater challenge — survival itself — the tone of Letter Never Sent drastically changes. All of the superimpositions of fire in the preceding scenes turn out to be a literal foreshadowing as the group fights for their lives.

For a Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD, this edition is sorely lacking in the kind of bonus content one would expect. There is the normal high-quality booklet, this one featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova, but other than that, no bonus features. That may speak to how overlooked the movie is. I read somewhere online that Francis Ford Coppola owned one of the few prints that anyone knew about of this film, previously referred to as The Unsent Letter.

It’s a good thing Criterion has restored it, and I have no doubt that its place in history as a visual wonder will be certified, not unlike I Am Cuba‘s, after more people see it.

This review of Film Noir Classics III originally appeared in shorter form on KSNT-NBC, KTKA-ABC, and KTMJ-FOX, Kansas First News.

Martin Scorsese is the chair of The Film Foundation, who partnered with Turner Classic Movies to release the new DVD box set of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics III.

In a brief video filmed on the set of Hugo, Scorsese introduces The Burglar, the best of the five newly restored crime movies from the 40s and 50s in this set that deserve another look.

An impressive heist-gone-wrong movie with a dark, pulpy center, The Burglar was filmed in 1955 before Jayne Mansfield was a star, but released two years later to capitalize on her newfound fame following The Girl Can’t Help It.

The Burglar is a very stylized film for a B movie. It was adapted from David Goodis‘ novel by the author himself, and director Paul Wendkos was clearly going for broke in his storytelling. He uses striking camera angles and far-out set pieces to frame what is essentially a psychological story about family loyalty.

There are some strong sexual undertones to lead Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield’s performances, which is disturbing since their characters were essentially raised as brother and sister. That’s part of what makes Goodis’ book so memorable, and its nice to see Wendkos keeping that bond in the film. He even uses some odd dream-like imagery for flashbacks in The Burglar. This is an underrated and overlooked gem, and The Burglar being restored and available on DVD is worth it alone.

My Name is Julia Ross, also in the Film Noir Classics III box set, is a 1945 Gothic-style mystery where a woman (Nina Foch) wakes up in an isolated mansion and everyone is telling her she’s someone else. It may not fit the typical mode of a film noir (no detectives, femme fatales, not an urban setting), but its certainly shot like one.  My Name Is Julia Ross wastes no time — it’s a brisk, thrilling movie (the running time is a whole 65 minutes) and it launched B-movie king Joseph H. Lewis’s career.

Another highlight that doesn’t quite fit the mold of noir is the 1951 crime thriller The Mob, an expertly-plotted noir starring Broderick Crawford that harkens back to the classic Warner Brothers gangster pictures of the 30s. The Mob is less psychologically disturbing and more straight-up undercover crime drama, but it ratchets up the tension nicely and Crawford is having a hell of a time acting like the tough guy.

Drive a Crooked Road also features a brief introduction in the Film Noir Classics III DVD box by Martin Scorsese where he says this 1954 noir is one of Mickey Rooney‘s finest performances. I would tend to agree. Rooney is certainly understated and extremely effective as a mechanic who moonlights as a race-car driver, but it still a lonely man known by his friends as “the little guy.” A slow-burn script by Blake Edwards makes fine use of excellent supporting players like Dianne Foster and Kevin McCarthy, who have plenty of time to craft three-dimensional characters.

The early sun-lit scenes of coastal beauty are overtaken completely by darkness and shadow as Mickey Rooney goes in on a bank heist out of desperation to please a dame who’s way out of his league. Director Richard Quine keeps everything in nice balance and by its downer of an ending, Drive a Crooked Road turns out to be quietly affecting.

Inspired by Senator Estes Kefauver coercing witness Virginia Hill to testify in the prosecution of her boyfriend Bugsy Siegel, Tight Spot is an efficient noir featuring Ginger Rogers cast way against type as a hard-boiled prison convict.

Attorney Edward G. Robinson offers her protection to testify against mobster Lorne Greene, but things get rapidly complicated and the cop who is assigned to watch her every move (Brian Keith) forms an unlikely attachment to her. Rogers’ mannerisms can sometimes be a little actorly, but Tight Spot is a solid drama and the chemistry between Ginger Rogers and Brian Keith is palpable.

For the third in a series of Columbia Pictures’ noirs, this is a very solid set of movies, even of the lack of extra features is pretty disappointing.

Now that Valentine’s Day has come and gone, maybe it’s time to replace the sweet romantic comedies of Tuesday with something a little darker and more disturbing. The Film Noir Classics III DVD box ought to just do the trick.

The Criterion Collection – La Jetée | Sans Soleil Blu-ray (2012) Review 

Is French photographer, filmmaker, videographer, poet, journalist, multimedia/installation artist Chris Marker “the most famous of unknown filmmakers”?

Certainly his 28-minute 1962 sci-fi short film La Jetée is one of the most well-known and influential short films of all time. Terry Gilliam expanded and remade the movie as 1995’s 12 Monkeys, and La Jetée is now pretty much standard viewing for any serious film class due to its unique approach to visual storytelling.

With the commercial Blu-ray release of La Jetée and Chris Marker’s philosophical documentary Sans Soleil by The Criterion Collection, appreciation of this intriguing and mysterious artist may reach a new level.

Of the two films, La Jetée is the one with the only thing you could call a clear narrative. Narration, sound effects, and some mumbled German dialogue accompany a montage of still black-and-white photographs (by Jean Chiabaud) at various dramatic paces to create the illusion of a moving picture. That is, with one very notable and subtle exception where an image suddenly moves with a huge emotional impact.

Criterion wisely presents La Jetée with both the English-language and French-language narration with subtitles so that viewers can experience the film both ways.  The notes say that Chris Marker produced both versions, and prefers people listen in their native language. The English translation allowed me to concentrate on the visuals rather than subtitles, but the French version narration is actually quite different.

Although La Jetée is a stunning example of graceful science-fiction drama, the film really is an exploration of  time and memory, and how these two things are perceived.

Set in an underground post-apocalyptic future, a man (Davos Hanich) is sent back to a time before World War III and a time in the distant future to “rescue the present.”

A childhood memory of a beautiful woman (Hélène Chatelain) and a man killed on the boarding platform of an airport has haunted him since his youth and serves as the man’s entry to dangerous time travel.

As a full-grown adult, he meets the woman in the past and falls in love with her. Things are complicated when he returns to the present and believes his captors mean to execute him.

La Jetée may be at once the simplest and most complicated of time-travel movies because although the plot is deceptively simple, Chris Marker doesn’t get mired in the complicated science of how time travel might work. Instead, it’s a stirring, emotional film about the unique hold memories have over people’s lives and how experiences themselves are fleeting.

La Jetée may be closest cousins with Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both films riff of of the same themes. Ironically, another director who got his start in music videos has a brief extra feature on the Blu-ray. Mark Romanek‘s video for David Bowie’s “Jump They Say” was directly influenced by La Jetée.

Chris Marker’s full-length “documentary” Sans Soleil is another beast entirely, although it shares a common theme with La Jetée. Both movies share references to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a personal obsession of Marker’s — and another movie built around the meaning of memory.

Shot mostly in color (and using some stock footage as well) in Japan, West Africa, Paris, San Francisco, Ireland, Guinea-Bissau, and Iceland, Sans Soleil uses voiceover narration to tie together seemingly disparate images from all over the world.

It mixes global history and supposedly personal history, as a female narrator (Florence Delay in the French version, Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads letters sent to her by cameraman Sandor Krasna (who himself is a fictitious character, a sort of stand-in for Chris Marker). Confused yet?

Those who appreciated the meditations on the meaning of life and humans’ place in the world in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life will find much to like in Sans Soleil.

The film challenges you to look at images with multiple contexts and ponder differing perspectives, which is really what film is all about in the end.

The fact that Sans Soleil was made in 1983 is frankly kind of mind-boggling. This Blu-ray set is a must-have for any serious fan of film as a forward-thinking art form. After watching these two films back to back, it’s clear that Chris Marker’s influence on cinema is pretty vast.

Chris Marker remains notably absent from commenting on his own work in the Criterion Blu-ray edition here, which is frustrating, but he’s certainly an enigma.

The Blu-ray includes an enlightening essay and interview in the booklet, video bits about Vertigo and “Jump They Say,” two interviews with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, a video piece on Chris Marker by filmmaker and critic Chris Darke called Chris on Chris, two excerpts from the French television series Court-circuit (le magazine) and Junkopia, a six-minute film by Marker, Frank Simone, and John Chapman.