This is a follow-up to the four previous installments of Selected Takes. In 1996, I started keeping a log of films I saw. Initially, I wrote notes for each film expressing my reactions, but eventually wrote less and less until I basically stopped sometime in 2001. Got lazy. I’d written these just for myself and had no thought or intention at the time that they might one day be released into the wild, so to speak. The films from 2000 in this post aren’t the only ones I saw that year, just those I wrote about and want to include here.

As before, when I mention a Sony or Loews theater, these are now AMC. AMMI (American Museum of the Moving Image) is now the Museum of the Moving Image. BAM is the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Except for minor edits and a few notations, I’ve left these entries as they were originally, though I’ve added posters for a little color. Present-day comments are in bold.

Since there are too many films for one post, I’ve decided to split this into two parts.

Also, I want to apologize for the overuse of adverbs such as “pretty” (as in “pretty good”), “really,” and others. This tends to be how I talk. I changed some of them in this post, but then figured what the hell, it is what it is.

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1/6. RESERVOIR DOGS at BAM Rose Cinema. Great seeing this again on big screen. It’s actually a much better film than I’d remembered, holds up very well. Harvey Keitel was there for q&a afterwards, which was nice, but brief and the moderator kind of got in the way.

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1/21. REAR WINDOW at Film Forum. Restored version. No missing scenes or footage, but a negative restoration with colors truer to the original release, or so they say. Good movie, but not as great as I’d remembered from the 1984 re-release. Stewart’s character is rather irritating. Grace Kelly is sublime, however. Thelma Ritter is very good. Some of the ongoing neighborhood dramas seem a bit contrived. Still, the almost silent movie playing of these scenes is pretty interesting.

I can’t account for my tepid reaction at the time. For me, Rear Window is close to perfect, one of my favorite Hitchcock films.

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2/11. MAD MAX at Film Forum. New print with Australian dialogue tracks restored. Opening 10-15 minutes are pretty amazing, but I found the rest very uneven. Impressive debut for Mel Gibson, though. Overall the movie has a Roger Corman/AIP low budget look and feel. Amazing how much more polished and solid ROAD WARRIOR is. Music score is pretty bad, though probably typical for the period and budget. I guess this movie has to be put in historical context to appreciate its significance and impact at the time. But I think in the U.S. it was only in the wake of ROAD WARRIOR that MAD MAX got any kind of attention. Seem to remember it was treated like typical exploitation 42nd Street kind of fare in its initial release. There was that great Frank Frazetta poster, though.

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2/12. THE BEACH at 62nd & B’Way. Not very good, though it has its moments. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a good performance, but his character is such a fuckup that it’s hard to empathize or identify with him. He’s certainly attractive enough, but the character makes serious mistakes that harm others while he comes out basically unharmed. The final scene seems to make everything okay. The shark damage to those two guys’ bodies is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, just horrendous. Looked very real. But the more I think about it, I don’t think the movie makes much sense on a narrative level. Danny Boyle can put together some powerful scenes, for what that’s worth. Still think SHALLOW GRAVE is his best movie so far.

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2/25. REINDEER GAMES at Sony Lincoln Square. Pretty bad. After RONIN I had my hopes up for Frankenheimer’s next film, this one. The characters are unappealing and the movie has a grubby look and feel. Donal Logue is pretty good as one of Gary Sinise’s gang, as is Clarence Williams III, who’s a long way from Mod Squad.

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3/10. MISSION TO MARS (Brian De Palma, director) at Sony Lincoln Square. Jaw-droppingly awful. Hard to imagine how a major studio release with a name cast could be this bad and actually get released in this shape. There wasn’t one believable moment in it. The endless sequence with Tim Robbin’s death was so badly written, acted and edited. It seems like every single aspect of this film was bad, everything. It’s hard to understand how this can happen.

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3/17. ERIN BROCKOVICH at Sony Lincoln Square. Pretty good. I’d been put off by the trailer, which seemed to show only clips of Julia Roberts making wisecracks. But Steven Soderbergh is a good director, so wanted to check it out. Roberts is very good in it, as are Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart. The narrative is a sort of combo CIVIL ACTION & NORMA RAE, without the tortured heaviness of the former. Seemed a little improbably that Roberts’ character could be so effective with her investigation so quickly, but what the hell. She also seemed more physical, in a sexual kind of way, in this movie. No doubt because that’s the character, but I was especially surprised by how long her legs are.

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3/19. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE at Quad. A friend recommended this, and he was right. I loved it, was absolutely blown away. Written & directed by a Bosnian living in London, Jasmin Dizdar, his first feature. Follows several groups of people, who we find out are connected in one way or another, and like WINTER SLEEPERS, RUN LOLA RUN and MAGNOLIA, has to do with how chance & coincidence can affect our lives. This one took a while to introduce all the characters and relationships and circumstances, but it seemed to build and build. It’s a very human movie.

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4/1. METROPOLIS at AMMI. At 140 minutes this is a longer version than previously shown in this country, or so they say. Print was from an archive or museum in Munich. The inter-titles were in German. A German guy was there to provide translation, though his accent sometimes got in the way, and seemed like he stumbled frequently. I wondered if he had the translation written out or was doing it off the screen. Latter doesn’t seem likely. Print quality varied a lot. Some footage looked like it had  been shot yesterday, but a lot of it really showed its age. Still an incredible movie, though. Our introduction to the robot Maria, and the transformation of the robot into flesh & blood was really powerful. The transformation scene had to have influenced the Universal Frankenstein films, particularly the first two.

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4/1. HIGH FIDELITY at Sony Lincoln Square. Pretty good. Didn’t like the talking to the camera routine too much. Seen too much of that, especially lately on TV. It can be pretty gimmicky. John Cusack, who I love, seems a little old for this character, or though maybe part of the point is that this guy is too old for the life he’s living. Didn’t find his girlfriend all that attractive. Wanted her to be prettier.

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4/4. GET CARTER & STORMY MONDAY at Film Forum. Really good, tough movie (CARTER). Saw it first time last fall at The Screening Room’s Michael Caine series. THE LIMEY has a lot of similarities to it. Saw STORMY MONDAY when it was first released, but remembered virtually nothing about it. Early Mike Figgis film. It’s pretty good, but maybe a little underdeveloped. Interestingly enough, Tommy Lee Jones’ performance is fairly weak, or maybe it’s the character, either not enough there or too cliched. Sean Bean & Melanie Griffith are good. I think Sting’s character needed more development.

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4/7. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT at Sony Lincoln Square. Not that great, but kept my interest all the same. Drags in places, not much character development. Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson are as good as they have to be to sell the material, but their characters just aren’t that interesting. Compare this performance to what Jones does as Sam Gerard in THE FUGITIVE, though I imagine he had more to work with in that one. The prologue in Vietnam isn’t all that convincing, doesn’t quite look or feel authentic. The firefight at the embassy in Yemen is very strong. I think Friedkin was deliberately going for a SAVING PRIVATE RYAN level of intensity, and sort of succeeds. Tag lines at the end tell us that Ben Kinglsey’s craven ambassador and Bruce Greenwood’s bad-guy NSA advisor  finally get what’s coming to them, but I felt dramatically cheated because I wanted some of that onscreen. Jones’ trip to Yemen to look for evidence could easily have been shortened to make room for more narrative follow-through at the end. Also, when Jackson was pronounced not guilty of the murder charge it didn’t come off as a big enough moment. The music and camera crane-up as he left the courtroom tried to create that, but wasn’t supported by the preceding scene.

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4/9. BREATHLESS at Film Forum. Hadn’t seen for this for many years. Couldn’t remember much of it. Also didn’t like it that much, though I think it helps to see it in its historical context, i.e. at the start of the French New Wave, really shaking up the more traditional styles of filmmaking, etc. Jean Seberg was so pretty. I suppose her French was supposed to sound that flat and bad.

I saw Breathless again recently, and still don’t much like it, though feel like I’m supposed to.

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4/11. THE FILTH AND THE FURY at Film Forum. Sex Pistols documentary made by Julien Temple. Interesting, occasionally very exciting, but was a little disappointed. The band, and Johnny Rotten in particular, really shook things up at the time, but they’re not particularly interesting people. Thought the method of having Lydon, Steve Cook & Glen Matlock completely in shadow during the present day interview segments was a big mistake, pointlessly distracting & annoying. I wanted to see them.

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4/15. AMERICAN PSYCHO at Loews 84th. This is pretty good, very funny. Christian Bale is great. Willem Dafoe seems kind of wasted, though he’s definitely a little creepy. Everything is a bit off-center, deliberately so, I think. My biggest objection, or maybe it’s confusion, is the way the film goes the last quarter or so. It becomes increasingly surreal, and rather apparent that much, if not all, of the violence has been in Bateman’s mind. So the movie becomes a question of what really happened and what didn’t. Chloe Sevigny is good. I actually thought there should be more on-screen violence, and have the feeling there was, but director Mary Harron had to cut stuff for the ratings board, though don’t know about this.

Yeah, I wanted it to be real.

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4/19. RETURN TO ME at Sony Lincoln Square.  Considering that there isn’t really any drama or conflict, beyond the basic premise, and no bad guys/girls, I really enjoyed it. Found it quite touching, actually, probably due to the casting, especially David Duchovny, who’s really appealing in this. Robert Loggia is great, as usual. Jim Belushi’s character was irritating to me at times. There’s something very simple and nice about this movie. ** Something the movie played with a little but then dropped was implying some sort of paranormal connection, psychic or emotional, between Minnie Driver’s character and Duchovny’s dead wife. There’s the moment at the zoo when she’s entering the gorilla house and passes Duchovny as he’s leaving. She stops and we feel like she felt something when he passed, but she doesn’t know what. More pointedly, when she puts her hand on the glass of Sydney’s cage and he puts his hand up against where hers is, which we saw him do earlier with Duchovny’s wife. Not sure why they put this in if they weren’t going to do anything more with it, but maybe they just wanted a hint or suggestion of something on a mysterious or spiritual level. Also, who is the kid on roller blades outside Duchovny’s house, and later inside the house when Duchovny’s leaving to go back to the restaurant to get his cell phone? Is he a neighbor kid? Most likely. But he’s just there a couple of times and then gone. Seemed a little strange, though I forgot about him until just a while ago.

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4/22. BARRY LYNDON at Film Forum. New 35mm print, which was very clean, though focus seemed a little soft at times. Wonder if this is how it was shot? Will check my laser disc copy sometime to see. Great movie, one of Kubrick’s best, I think. Ryan O’Neal still seems like an odd casting choice, though, but I think it works.

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4/23. WOMAN IN THE WINDOW & SCARLET STREET at AMMI. Two really good films in the Fritz Lang series. Had seen both before, but only on video, never in 35mm in a theater. Edward G. Robinson’s characters in both are similar, though the one in WOMAN is stronger. His character in SCARLET STREET  goes from rather pathetic to tragic

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4/29. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES at Sony Lincoln Square. First feature written & directed by Sofia Coppola. Interesting, but kept me at a distance. Of the five sisters, only two had any identity; I couldn’t tell the others apart. Same for the two sets of boys, with the exception of Josh Hartnett’s character, the improbably named Trip Fontaine. The film seemed really clever at times, clumsy & underproduced at others. James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the girls’ parents suggested deeper stuff going on, but we never got to it. Scott Glenn looked very much not like a priest in his brief role as a priest.

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4/29. FREQUENCY at Sony Lincoln Square. Pretty good, though it falls apart in the last half hour or so. The time travel premise of a son in 1999 communicating with his father via short wave radio back through time in 1969 is an interesting one, but they could’ve done a lot more with it. The idea of changing the past, i.e. preventing a death, and then having to deal with the consequences of how that change has caused other changes, i.e. other deaths that hadn’t happened in the first time-line, is fairly old ground in science fiction writing, but I wish they’d developed it more here. BACK TO THE FUTURE II really got into the convolutions & paradoxes of this kind of stuff. When the movie focuses on the search for a serial killer both in 1969 and 1999, it becomes far less interesting, and the parallel climax really doesn’t work. But I basically liked it, though Dennis Quaid’s Queens accent and Andre Braugher’s 1999 old-age makeup are both a little weird. The boy who plays Jim Cazeviel’s character in 1969 is really quite striking, a wonderful smile.

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4/30. THE IDIOTS at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Lars von Trier “Dogma 95” movie. Didn’t like it much, though I liked the actress who played Suzanne. There are many scenes in which male frontal nudity is blocked out by a traveling black square. Read afterwards that this was done just to avoid an NC-17 rating in this country. Which seems a little strange since the film is not rated according to the newspaper ads. Anyway, it’s annoying and works against the film, I think. But also interesting in that female full frontal nudity in the film is not censored in this way, so I guess breasts and pubic hair are okay, but cocks get blocked out.

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5/5. GLADIATOR at Sony Lincoln Square. Liked this, though felt like there was something missing that could have made it really rousing. Russell Crowe is great in it. Doesn’t evoke much of the 50s & 60s sword & sandal movies. It didn’t feel like the same historical period that I got familiar with in those movies, and I guess I missed that. Didn’t get the scope of sequences like the chariot race in BEN HUR or the huge set built for FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. The computer-created stuff is good, but doesn’t match the physical feel of those earlier movies. The gladiator combat scenes are pretty intense.

5/27. GLADIATOR at Ziegfeld. Really held up on second viewing. Liked it better this time, actually, found it more impressive. Russell Crowe sells the film; he brings a lot of heart and energy to the role. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance still seems a bit precious.

I’ve come to love this film. I find it very repeatable. Can’t account for my initial reaction, though I must have felt something, since I saw it again three weeks later. Though the second time was at the Ziegfeld, which is where I should have seen it in the first place. Really miss that theater.

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5/14. GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL & GO TELL THE SPARTANS at Walter Reade. Had seen GUNFIGHT several times before, but didn’t like it very much this time around. It’s very much rooted in a 50s/60s style of “big” studio Westerns (and feels contrived in a way that THE SEARCHERS definitely doesn’t). Kirk Douglas has the most interesting part and gives the most interesting performance. ** Hadn’t thought I’d seen SPARTANS before, but now I think I may have, or at least parts of it. It’s pretty good, very downbeat, though the locations don’t feel like Vietnam at all (think it was shot in Southern California). The production has a low-budget look, but it’s a very interesting movie.

Go Tell the Spartans is notable in that I think it was one of the first feature films to deal with our involvement in Vietnam war.

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5/19. TIME CODE at AMC 25. Pretty interesting. The narrative or “plot” is the least interesting thing about this film, but the style and method Mike Figgis uses is what’s really going on. Using four digital video cameras and uninterrupted takes following different characters (sometimes the same characters at the same time from different perspectives), we see all this via split screen, quadrants really, four small screens within the screen of the movie theater. Figgis directs our attention by raising and lowering the sound from a particular screen, but I found myself often drifting to the other screens, so I was doing my own editing in a way. Not sure how or if this would work with other films, but it does raise some interesting ideas. The actors apparently improvised within a pre-set structure. This works pretty well. Also, the image quality looked great, looked like film to me, though it had to be a digital tape to film transfer.

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5/20. SMALL TIME CROOKS at Lincoln Square. Pretty lame Woody Allen movie. Harks back to his early films, but is quite clumsy at times. Tracy Ullmann & Hugh Grant are good. Woody and Tracy are obviously supposed to be Ralph and Alice from “The Honeymooners”, especially in the first part of the movie when he’s launching his sure-fire bank robbery scheme.

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5/25. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 at Loews E-Walk. Pretty bad, though I sort of enjoyed it. Seemed like such a cynical project, made with little feeling, emotion. There was nothing really at stake for these characters. The PG-13 rating made Woo hold back on the violence, i.e. almost no blood or bullet hits despite all the gunfire. Might’ve been better as an R. The fight between Cruise and the villain at the end was total cartoon violence. This kind of violence is horseshit because it totally denies consequences or results. FACE/OFF is the best John Woo American film, but nothing he’s done here so far compares to his HK films. Kind of weird seeing Robert Towne’s screenwriting credit, since the story is the weakest aspect of the movie.

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6/2. THE VAMPIRE LOVERS at Film Forum. Not very good, but at least seeing it checks a box in my Hammer Films screening history. Peter Cushing’s role is more of a cameo, definitely no more than a subsidiary character. Ingrid Pitt is quite something, though. The lesbian stuff is pretty tame, though probably strong enough for 1970. The actresses playing the young girls seduced by Pitt’s character were totally without interest. The actress who played the governess had something going on, however. Typically cheesy late-Hammer production values. Nice looking new 35mm print.

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6/3. DINOSAUR at AMC 25. Technically it’s very cool, story is okay. Saw this in digital projection, which looked great, though I’d like to be able to compare it to film projection. Would also like to see a live-action film projected digitally. Guess I’ll be able to soon enough.

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6/24. THE TRIAL at Film Forum. New print, looked very good. Don’t think I’d ever seen this before in its entirety, though had definitely seen some scenes somewhere. Don’t like the ending with Joseph K being blown up (apparently) in a pit out in a field, but overall liked it a lot. There are some incredibly striking scenes; for example, Perkins entering his work area and we see hundreds of people typing at desks in what looks like an aircraft hanger-sized space, or his surprising speech in the courtroom, if that’s what it was, packed with seemingly several hundred men in dark suits. Romy Schneider was a very erotic presence. Disturbing movie, glad I saw it.

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7/7. BLOOD SIMPLE at Lincoln Plaza. Doesn’t have the impact it had when I first saw it in 1984, but still pretty good. Easy to see how it got a lot of attention at the time, but it’s not new anymore. Pretty influential, considering how many other filmmakers have gone down this road since then.

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7/11. MCCABE & MRS MILLER at BAM. New 35mm print, looked great. The film doesn’t move me the way it did when I fell in love with it when it came out in ‘71, but it’s a very good movie. McCabe seems like more of a fool to me now. Guess I haven’t seen it in quite a few years. Altman was there for Q&A afterwards, interviewed by Elvis Mitchell of the NYT. Altman was great. Called Warren Beatty an asshole but said he wouldn’t change a thing about Beatty’s performance in MCCABE..

Great film. Among other things, it introduced me to the music of Leonard Cohen.

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8/4. HOLLOW MAN at AMC 25. Astounding special effects, but pretty bad movie. Interesting how much more story there was in the 1933 INVISIBLE MAN. Paul Verhoeven has made far better, more involving, films. One problem is that Kevin Bacon’s character is such an asshole to begin with, that when he gets trapped in his invisible state it doesn’t mean much. There’s no sense of tragedy, as in INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, because I don’t care much for the character.

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8/6. WONDERLAND at Angelika. Liked this a lot, but was distracted by the film being slightly out of focus the entire time. Went out three times to ask that the projectionist check the focus, but it never happened. Afterwards talked to the manager and was given a free pass, big deal. There’s a sort of MAGNOLIA-like feel to this movie, maybe in part because of how the music is used over parallal sequences and the way we keep cycling through several sets of characters’ lives over a 3-day period. A scene where the three main characters’ mother, pissed off at the neighbor’s incessantly barking dog, sits in the dark in her living room easy chair and begins barking herself, and actually seems to frighten the dog.

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8/12. GIMME SHELTER at Film Forum. 30th anniversary re-release of this Maysles documentary. Still pretty powerful, a shrewd structure, but left me feeling more bummed out by the end than anything else. The performance footage at the beginning is very exciting and takes you back. Scenes in the editing room of Jagger & Charlie Watts watching footage from the movie are the most interesting to me.

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That does it for this one. Part 2 will be up in a couple of days. Stay tuned. — Ted Hicks

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