Lest we forget (but who could?), before there was Woody Allen the major filmmaker lionized in the series of blog posts below, there was, of course, Woody Allen the former stand-up man taking hesitant, awkward steps into a brand new medium. On a visual level, the early stuff isn’t pretty, and the tension between his love for the careful aesthetics of his European idols and his own rumpled comedy find no better expression than the hysterical Bergman parodies/homages in Love and Death. It’s perhaps telling that he hit his stride aesthetically following that film and hasn’t really looked back.

Working in the same budget future-shock vein as Alphaville and Je t'aime, je t'aime (it also makes a nice dystopian double bill with the terrific Children of Men), 1973’s Sleeper was Allen’s most coherent stab at a semblance of three-act narrative to date. “Semblance” is key—weighing in at 84 minutes, the film’s pretty loose and more than a little padded. But even if there may be two or three too many Keystone Kops-esque chase sequences, stretching out into a beginning, middle, and end hasn’t dulled Allen’s satire a whit. Indeed, as in Cuarón’s film (just lighter), Allen uses his future-on-five-dollars-or-less setting as an empty vessel into which he can pour a fair bit of scathing commentary about the mess that is/was the 20th Century. His vision of the future as a collection of bulbous household amenities and shoddily constructed cars isn’t too shabby, either.

Also notable in that it marks the director’s first collaboration with his longtime muse Diane Keaton (looking astonishingly lovely) Sleeper serves as a ready reminder of just how little Allen’s comedy has changed through the years—even as recently as last summer’s Scoop, the director still relies on lodged camera setups that allow him space to rant and worry at length. Conventional wisdom suggests that the late comedies (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Small Time Crooks, etc.) don’t hold up nearly as well as his earlier works, but I find it hard to really draw a distinction. All the films seem to hit a fairly consistent groaners-to-laughs ratio, and putting Woody Allen into almost any scenario (private eye, vaudeville magician, time traveler, Russian solider) is about as close as you can get to a sure bet in my book. Perhaps Dave Kehr, writing for the Chicago Reader nails Sleeper (and many of Allen’s comedies) best: “…An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a ‘movie.’ But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.”

Like the flashback opening minutes of Annie Hall stretched out to feature length, Radio Days is so brimming with dog-eared Brooklyn nostalgia it practically feels like a family photograph album narrated by a wistful and daffy uncle. The film has been likened to Fellini’s Amarcord, and it does appear similar in that it seems to court audience approval even as it burrows into its filmmaker’s own memories with abandon. Yet I have always infinitely preferred “Radio Days”’ somber, enveloping sepias to “Amarcord”’s spangled excesses, though it may be only because Fellini’s elaborate provincial quirk has been imitated so many times since, and even perhaps set the standard for crowd-pleasing foreign products. A memory piece about Allen’s childhood, depicted through his fondness for radio songs and broadcasts, Radio Days is fleet and charming from beginning to end, functioning almost as sketch comedy—it’s a series of vignettes, smoothly connected through period standards and lush costumes. A very young Seth Green is the prepubescent Woody surrogate (preferable to Jason Biggs, no?), living with his parents in a modest two-story house in Rockaway; in between their ridiculous squabbles (“Are you telling me you think the Atlantic is a better ocean than the Pacific?”), Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker find so many poignant moments of working-class exhaustion (Tucker refuses to tell his son what he does for a living; Kavner daydreams about the lives of the glamorous voices she listens to on the radio) that they transcend the film’s comic black-out pacing.

Wha truly elevates Radio Days, though, is its central dichotomy, between the warm glow of childhood remembrance and the haze of celebrity tales and rumors of the rich and famous. Cross-cutting between the family’s shabby Brooklyn home and the affluence of the radio stars they admire, Radio Days timelessly and touchingly evokes the ever-present seductive pull of the myth of celebrity (later delineated in Allen’s less successful but still underrated Celebrity) on admiring, unfamous folks; hilariously, the faces we see often don’t correspond to the voices distorted over the airwaves, especially when the Masked Avenger is played, of course, by little lisper Wallace Shawn. The most memorable performance in the film, however, is from Mia Farrow’s gloriously ditsy Sally, followed from squeaky-voiced cocktail waitress (“Cigar? Cigarette?”) to lush-throated radio personality; Sally is one of Farrow’s greatest creations, along with the terrific, layered work she put forth in Broadway Danny Rose, September, Alice, and Husbands and Wives, all of which were the best roles granted to the actress since her Rosemary’s Baby tour de force. “Hawk! I heah the cannons roah! Is it the king approaching?” she squwaks like Betty Boop on helium in front of the mirror, practicing her speech-class lessons. Yet despite Sally’s positioning as mere comic relief, Farrow imbues her with both sweetness and humanity, and her rise to the top never feels overly opportunistic or unearned.

Radio Days is playing at Film Forum Friday and Saturday, though it would have been the perfect film for New Years’ Eve, as it ends with a memorably emotional shift into 1944, showing the celebrations in both the household and a glamorous gathering of broadcast stars. Diane Keaton shows up at the party and sings Cole Porter’s lovely “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and it wafts across the airwaves and right into the two-story Brooklyn house, where the family members hug each other tenderly and joyously, wish for an end to the war, and generally enjoy their love for one another. It’s a humble complacency that feels missing from most of Woody’s work, which does view wealth and privilege with the same love-hate relationship as Radio Days but also usually aligns itself with the upper-class Manhattan that Woody ascended to. Only in the past does the writer/director focus on the working class, as he obviously views it as a place he crawled out from—a problematic strain in his work, wonderfully grappled with in Radio Days.

Friday December 29 11:12 PM ET

Donkey-faced asshole Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni, best-known for the Academy Award-winning Holocaust comedy Life Is Beautiful, a feel-good sham that hoodwinked millions of moviegoers way back in the winter of 1998, many of whom had never attended a subtitled film before, is about to unleash his new film The Tiger and the Snow on unsuspecting moviegoers this week. Though it already opened at theaters across Europe, Tiger is just now hitting U.S. screens with barely a titter of recognition. When asked if they'd seen the film, several prominent Reverse Shot critics responded: "What? That asshole made another movie?"

Tiger features everyone's favorite lovable scamp and eminent purveyor of comic-gold-spun-from-human-misery as a poet and university teacher in Rome who journeys to Iraq to save the life of the head-wounded girl of his dreams, played by Benigni's real-life wife and personality-free dramatic foil Nicoletta Braschi. A paean to the transformative power of art, the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability of one man to make all of the world's ills into his own opportunistic playground of Disney-honed platitudes, The Tiger and the Snow also bosts several of the filmmaker's trademarks: the female love interest who exists only to stare speechlessly in thrall to her comic savior, bumbling slapstick comedy that appeals mostly to old-world cretins who haven't seen a good national film in about two decades, and nonstop tastelessness and crudity often mistaken for "irreverence."

The thirteen people who still admire Life Is Beautiful for its bold recreation of the Holocaust (especially in its authentic depiction of concentration camp anvil carrying) responded in unison that they couldn't wait to run to the Quad cinema for the U.S. premiere of The Tiger and the Snow. "I can't wait to see what that asshole made this time!" one exclaimed, as she picked sunflower seeds out of her teeth, "I hope it's as good as Pinocchio."

Though it’s plainly obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a Woody Allen film, the point must still be made: in his ability to direct actors—or at least, to direct great performances—Allen has few peers in contemporary American cinema. The Essentially Woody retrospective offers more than ample evidence, packing at least a dozen great performances into three short weeks, from Mia Farrow’s fragile loveliness in The Purple Rose of Cairo through Gena Rowlands’s restrained desperation in Another Woman to Alan Alda’s riotous idiocy in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Of course, Allen can’t take all the credit, since he tends to work with exceptional performers on a regular basis, but still, it took a special talent to direct then-future Bride of Chucky, Jennifer Tilly, to an Oscar nomination, a feat he achieved with the 1994 backstage period comedy Bullets Over Broadway, which stands as one of the director’s funniest and most accomplished films of the past two decades—cleverly written, beautifully designed, and well-shot, to be sure, but a movie that truly soars on the quality of its extraordinary performances.

An ensemble piece in the truest sense of the word, Bullets Over Broadway boasts at least a half dozen inspired comic turns (in practically any other film, Jim Broadbent, Rob Reiner, and Tracey Ullman would all be the scene stealers; here, they’re amusing diversions). Still, towering above them all is Allen-mainstay Dianne Wiest as the boozy, aging Broadway star Helen Sinclair. Wiest had previously brought a wounded, human quality to films like Radio Days and Hannah and Her Sisters; here she bursts into the film, hurling a script down a flight of stairs, “You must be joking!” Wiest’s Helen is a thunderous presence, her narcissism, insecurity, and theatricality providing the center of gravity for the play within the film and the film itself. Her over-the-top bravado swept almost every supporting actress award that year (on the male side, Martin Landau, who should’ve received every award on the planet for Crimes and Misdemeanors, picked up equally well-deserved accolades for his work in Ed Wood); a decade later, I remain convinced that Wiest’s performance is one for the ages—endlessly quotable (“Don’t speak!”; “The world will open to you like an oyster. No, not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina!”), side-splittingly funny, and absolutely transfixing.

The performers have the benefit of a deft and clever screenplay, co-scripted by Allen and Douglas McGrath, which tackles serious intellectual issues (Do artists create their own moral universe? Where do an artist’s aesthetic commitments end and ethical responsibilities begin?) with a playful dexterity. Bullets Over Broadway takes an amusing enough setup—a mobster bankrolls a lousy play so his mistress, herself a lousy actress, can have her big break—and twists it into a richly textured morality play. When it first came out, many critics were quick to read Bullets Over Broadway as Allen’s mea culpa, his artistic response to the well-publicized affair that had tarnished his public reputation a few years prior. Personally, I think that’s too easy: Bullets Over Broadway may have asked the same ethical questions that were dogging Allen himself during those tumultuous years (after all, he’s always been an extremely personal filmmaker), but like his best work, it leaves the tough questions unanswered—it’s a cry of moral confusion masquerading as a titter of delight. Today at Film Forum.

When you're coming of age as a movie-watcher, and just growing aware of the idea of auteurism, or at least that there are certain filmmakers who have attained a grandeur that sets them apart from the vast landscape of movies, you also grow a steely resolve against such notions. It's difficult to jump right into an oeuvre; and tenfold if you're still just a kid. In my case, I needed a gateway film into the work of Woody Allen--growing up in a Jewish household, of course, his name had always been spoken well of, accompanied by a few chuckles, as well as a certain degree of reverence usually withheld when it came to mere comics. My first encounters with Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters didn't go over well, their mix of headiness and froth was confounding and even downright unpalatable to an undeveloped intellect such as mine; and the shenanigans of Sleeper truly boggled the mind with the film’s plus-sized sight gags, political commentary, and disregard for narrative conventions.

I needed to be eased in, and that chance came with Manhattan Murder Mystery, which not only moved along with a buoyancy that didn't preclude linear narrative; it was a new film, when I first saw it in 1993, so it had the bonus of freshness--something I could embrace as a film of my generation rather than of my parents', something that wasn’t seemingly trapped in amber (yes, Hannah was a mere seven years old, but in kid years that was an eternity). Hilarious that a film that takes as its subject the restlessness of middle-age should appeal to a kid of fourteen, but by some alchemy, Woody Allen clicked for me with Manhattan Murder Mystery--the actor/director's nebbish persona, the New York adoration, the individualized aesthetic, the film history recall. Coming right after the drenched-in-scandal Husbands and Wives surprised the mainstream movie world by employing jittery, handheld camerawork, Murder Mystery used the same shaky-cam for a completely different effect, lending the film's intricate and silly crime-caper plot a scatterbrained immediacy.

Whereas Annie Hall was totally alien to me (young neurotic love in New York City might as well have been raking pebbles on the moon), an aging couple with empty-nest syndrome spying on their neighbors had a vivacity and a tender, domestic recognition. It also helped that Diane Keaton was given front and center this time around; it's one of her most fine-tuned, joyous performances, and she's allowed to run the comical gamut, from daffy nosiness (regarding her seemingly normal little old Jewish neighbors) to marriage frustration (with her "fuddy-dud" husband, Woody's unadventurous book editor Larry) to giddy flirtation (with her best friend, Alan Alda's unmarried restaurateur wannabe) to seething jealousy (against Anjelica Huston's hotshot writer, one of Larry's star clients).

"Too much Double Indemnity," Larry warns Carol when he fears she's becoming too manic in her pursuit of her neighbor's guilt over the sudden heart-attack death of his wife--yet Allen's obviously the one doing the studying of classical Hollywood crime thrillers. Murder Mystery's got a surprisingly sturdy plot; though it moves along via wild coincidences and slapdash logic gaps, it's full of enough twists and turns and has so many virtuoso surprises up its sleeve that it could have stood on its own without having to go all mega-meta hall of mirrors-ish in that Lady from Shanghai climax. Again, there are moments you look forward to like favorite tracks of a CD: Keaton's middle-of-the-night spy session, in which an exasperated Allen unsuccessfully "forbids" her to peek on the neighbors (“I forbid you to go! Is that what you do when I'm forbidding? ? Well, if that's what you're going to do then I'm not going to be forbidding you a lot...."); Huston's backfiring ruse to trap the killer, in which the group uses an unreliable spliced-together tape to try and blackmail him over the phone ("Yes, they're keeping it refrigerated!"); Larry and Carol sneaking into a hotel after hours, checking up on a lead, only to be trapped in a dark elevator with a dead body.

It's the perfect updating of the bumbling detective, perfectly wedded to Allen's eternal fish-out-of-water persona and Keaton's game resolve. With musty memories of Murder, She Wrote, that concurrent Dick Van Dyke geriatrics-on-the-trail show, and now Monk, it seems that only Woody could make the aging-sleuths subgenre seem fresh. And it still does. It's said that Annie Hall’s origins were as a comical murder mystery itself ("Anhedonia"), and if that's the case, it seems to have been a good move to wait until these two actors hit their peak. To paraphrase Keaton's Carol, the roles fit them like an old pair of shoes ("but never comfortable," Larry adds), and this is the sort of chemistry that can only be honed over a course of many years.

Woody Allen's lustrous Eighties period hit so many high points and was so rich with singular concepts (Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Another Woman, Zelig!) that the delicate The Purple Rose of Cairo seems like a particularly nimble trifle. But what a trifle! The ending is rightfully regaled--it's the entire point of the movie boiled down to one wistful, empathetic shot of Mia Farrow's trembling porcelain face. The closing image of Purple Rose is so powerful and speaks so much about movie-watching (it's the viewer's response to the closing of Sunset Boulevard), that it's easy to forget that there's so much joy that comes before the sorrow.

Farrow embodies sweet movie nostalgia as Depression-era waitress Cecilia, lost in moviegoing to escape financial and emotional instability and a loveless marriage to a craps-shooting deadbeat (a pre-Do the Right Thing Danny Aiello, with flashes of the rage to come); yet it's Jeff Daniels's smart double turn as both the blissed-out pith-helmeted Tom Baxter, who steps off the movie screen to experience the unscripted real world, and the arrogant movie star who plays him, Gil Shepherd, that holds the film together and gives it its goofy, slapdash charm. Baxter's experiences in a brothel (with Allen's always terrific mainstay Dianne Wiest as an improbable whore) seem like tacked-on bawdy merriment, yet Daniels's little-boy-in-a-candy-store grin puts the whole thing over the top.

Naturally, Purple Rose never reaches the inventive heights of its obvious progenitor, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., but only Radio Days has surpassed it in purity of directorial vision. If there's a certain lack of conflict and an overall timidity in the project (even with that heartbreaker of an ending, the stakes never seemed all that high), Woody Allen's decision to let the whimsy play out naturally without a surplus of snazzy one-liners or philosophical rantings make it one of the most memorable high-concept one-offs of his career. Of course, it should be seen in the theater, with Mia looking back at you as you both sit in the dark. Today and tomorrow, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, at Film Forum.

Odds are that most cinephiles of my generation, and most Reverse Shot writers, were watching Woody Allen movies before they ever saw anything by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini; before they ever read anything by Dostoevsky or Ibsen; before they were aware of the sizable disparity in aesthetics between American and European cinema; before they were brushing up on their Nietzsche or read Rilke; before they knew the radical cultural differences his films evinced, and that cinema and, furthermore, pop culture itself had completely consumed and regurgitated his philosophical style and outlook. Often either regaled or demeaned as being merely a conduit to the “higher arts” mentioned above, Woody Allen is actually one of the most essential American artists of the past century, subsuming and reappropriating the textures of the modern European arts for the American cosmopolitan sensibility, funneling those tropes into a New York tenor, and thus single-handedly creating a new form of Jewish humor, which tightened the Borscht belt around the ever-inflating girth of the gentile elitism he (and we) both despises and covets. Each Woody Allen film is tricky to navigate; while he seems to put himself out there, in firing range, bearing his neuroses for all to heckle, he also always is shielding himself from some greater truth, whether by hiding behind Upper East Side extravagance or Euro art-house nostalgia.

But that’s the great paradox: what he hates he loves and vice versa, and that dichotomy has yielded not three or four, but at least fifteen or sixteen, of the most indelible, awkward, rich, hilarious, and consistently personal American films of the past thirty years. On the average, he’s made at least a film a year since he won his first Oscar, for Annie Hall, and even when he’s been down (Shadows and Fog, a few of the late, “funny” ones), you get the sense that he’s just warming up for the next one while spitting out a few more demons. With Film Forum starting their three-week long Essentially Woody series today, as a (hopefully) savvy bit of Christmas counterprogramming for the director’s target NY Jewish audience, it’s as good a time as any to begin a look back on his greatest, most overlooked, and of course, most endlessly quotable films.

First up, as if there was any question, is Annie Hall, that 1977 Best Picture–winning (which seems reeeeeally odd nowadays) masterpiece that both redefined the parameters of romantic comedy (ushering the death knell for Neil Simon; look at The Goodbye Girl now, released the same year—it looks like a fossil) and completely reimagined Woody Allen’s artistic potential. Nearly every single scene in its swift 94 minutes is hilarious, save Diane Keaton’s unbearably beautiful renditions of “Seems Like Old Times” and “It Had to Be You.” Yet there’s a central melancholy to the film that never quite abates—announced in the opening, black on white title cards, with absolutely no accompanying music whatsoever. These credits were as grand a statement as Allen was ever to make; yes, this was to be an American film, a romance, a screwball comedy, about dating, filled with uproarious one-liners and direct-address tomfoolery, but there was no question as to Woody’s appreciation for the finer things, the silence and spaces of foreign cinema, and no amount of stand-up comedy or years of bonkers, narrative-nose-thumbers like Love and Death and Bananas were going to get in his way.

It’s still a glorious thing, skittering across the surface of a doomed relationship without recourse to linearity; of course, as far as achronological romances go, Two for the Road, in a sense, got there first, in 1967, yet Allen’s moroseness never gets in the way of his cutting observations, and unlike Donen’s film, Annie Hall avoids all of the frothy frolicking that had become the mainstay of American romantic comedy. Consistently hilarious and never, even for a moment, frivolous, Annie Hall also provided Diane Keaton with the proper springboard (after years of misuse in lugubrious, solemn wife roles) for her patented brand of drippy, self-evasive hangdoggedness—she’s attractively masculine, yet with a feminine rosy glow, the perfect object of affection and fear for Woody’s hyper-emasculated small fry. Simply put, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that brings me more joy in cinema than the first meeting between Annie and Alvy, the post-tennis “la-dee-dah” awkwardness, the nauseating car ride back to her place (‘Let me ask you something? Is this a sandwich?”), Keaton’s completely incomprehensible Thanksgiving-narcolepsy anecdote, the rambling bit of subtitled interplay on the roof deck, and then finally, after all that, Annie’s obliviously insulting conversation ender: “You’re what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew.”

To which Woody Allen can only respond, with a quizzical, “Oh … thank you.”

Of course, he still falls in love with her. (As do we.) The things we hate and love are often all wrapped up in the same package. The perfect beginning to a career that still can’t reconcile those impulses.

Upward and onward, faithful Shot-scateers! At the tail end of of a year full of firsts for our venerable online film journal, Reverse Shot is proud to announce the christening of our very own vanity DVD label, through which we will make available to the public a wide range of out-of-print and unjustifiably-overlooked buried treasures of the arthouse. And it is with great pride that we announce the maiden release of RS DVD:

Available for the first time on DVD, the entire 13-episode run of Mr. Smith, the groundbreaking NBC sitcom that cast a jaundiced, Orwellian wit on Reagan-era backroom politics, following the adventures of the titular "Mr. Smith": Cha-Cha, a talking orangutan with an IQ of 256 who arrives in Washington as a no-nonsense political advisor (played with close-to-the-vest, deadpan charmby Every Which Way But Loose's incorrigible, raspberry-blowing "CJ").

Included are all of the now-legendary episodes that galvanized the nation for three months in 1983, including "Mr. Smith Plays Cyrano," "Mr. Smith Rescues Bobo," and the censor-baiting, double-entendre-laden "Mr. Smith Gets Physical." Discs include cast bios, a stills gallery, commentary by voice-of-Cha-Cha Ed Weinberger and writers Stan Daniels and David Lloyd, and specially-commissioned essays by Manny Farber, Anne Coulter, Joan Didion, and Dave Barry.

Here at Reverse Shot, we care about keeping you up-to-date on all the hottest buzz -- after all, that's our job; we are film critics!-- and so we scraped and saved and sent one of our own (yours truly!) to the hotttest ticket in town (that's 3 t's and 4 stars, if you're counting!): the $25 all exclusive screening of Dreamgirls! And let me tell you: the Ziegfeld hasn't shook from applause like this since the Liza with a Z screening last March!

Okay, in all seriousness, Liza with a Z is the best thing ever. As for Dreamgirls, well... Never mind the nonexistent screenplay or the facile approach to its subject, the biggest problem with Dreamgirls is that the musical numbers -- the disappointing music, the apologetic staging (as if writer-director Bill Condon wants to insist, "Look, they're singing, but it's okay, because now they're onstage!")--are utterly boring and forgettable. It's no wonder people are so effusive about Jennifer Hudson; at least it feels like something is happening when she's onscreen. And let me join the chorus. Hudson is something truly special (her performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going", owing exclusively to her considerable talent, was among the most devastating moments of cinema I experienced all year), but she's certainly not perfect -- she can sing, and she can act, but every time she's called upon to speak...

Anyway. So Hudson's the best thing about a bad (or at least really boring) movie, but still, the Dreamgirls hype reproduces itself. Why are people paying $25 to see this thing? Wait, better question: why did I pay $25 to see this thing? And the worst part of all is that hype begets more hype. Create an event, and people will go. They'll pay their $25, applaud (hell, they even cheered Beyonce), and go home and tell their friends they have to see Dreamgirls. It's brilliant marketing. In fact, it's the only brilliant thing about Dreamgirls.

While it seems as though Steven Soderbergh’s utterly self-sufficient and (deficient) The Good German, which we reviewed last week at indieWIRE, has already disappeared from public consciousness (even though it just opened Friday), Manohla Dargis’s terrific piece this weekend in the New York Times, might certainly prove to stand the test of time. Though a lot of criticism is leveled (sometimes from here, and sometimes unfairly) at the New York Times film section, there’s simply no question that writing like this—more of a think piece than a weekly review, though it heartily fulfills the needs of both—elevates the whole team, and film writing in general.

This, on Soderbergh’s resurgence of the past decade: “It has been a second act that, until recently, seemed as smart as the man living it but that has grown gradually more disjointed as Mr. Soderbergh’s penchant for experimentation has become an end in itself rather than a means to aesthetic liberation. That’s too bad for us, for him and for Hollywood, which frankly could use all the help it can get.” Good stuff—incisive, cutting, and evidence, along with Dargis’s recent piece on Inland Empire, that her hire was the smartest move the Times could have made. Thanks for the read.

One of the undisputed masterworks of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (its German title translates as “Everyone for himself, and God against all”), which screens this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, begins with a series of pastoral scenes of the German countryside. The swelling music and windswept fields evoke the romantic spirit of the early nineteenth century, but the subtitle—an unattributed paraphrase of a line from Georg Buchner’s Lenz—asks, "But can you not hear the dreadful screaming all around that people usually call silence?" The ironies, tensions, and contradictions expressed so potently in these opening moments hardly require explication, and would probably sound hopelessly banal if I tried to offer one, but it should suffice to say that with Kaspar Hauser, Herzog intends on both demystifying and remystifying human experience, to look at the world through the eyes of a man with the mind of a child and to respond with a gasp of wonder and an existential howl.

Kaspar Hauser was a real person, born sometime around 1812, found in the streets of Nuremberg in 1828 holding a prayer book in one hand and a letter in the other. Hauser had spent the first decade or so of his life in complete isolation, chained in a dark room with a toy wooden horse. A few years before he was found, a man began making periodic visits, teaching him a few words and phrases, as well as how to write his name. Known as the “foundling”, Hauser may have been a descendent of the royal house of Baden, though the controversy surrounding his origins rages to this day.

While Herzog dramatizes the wider attention generated by Kaspar’s sudden appearance, he’s ultimately more concerned with the philosophical, intellectual, and moral complexities of Kaspar’s personal experience. Bruno S., a street orphan who had no previous acting experience, delivers a remarkable performance in the lead role, his face registering Kaspar’s confusion, joy, terror, and genius all at once—Kaspar somehow manages to function as a metaphor and siphon and also as a genuinely sympathetic protagonist (his tears of pain, upon touching a flame for the first time, are tremendously moving). Kaspar is constantly offered as contrast to systems of logic, order, power, and language, whether they are clergy, the academy, or the social and political elite. Yet Herzog never loses sight of the beauty of his natural humanness; Kaspar’s heart swells while listening to a friend play music; he pauses, awestruck at his own image reflected in a barrel of water.

As I sit at home (ironically enough, recovering from an acute case of laryngitis, an appropriate malady from which to suffer while pondering this particular film), still haunted by last night’s viewing (my second), I’m struck by both the beauty and boldness of this film. Herzog has always been a rather icy, intellectual filmmaker, and in a way, this film is no exception -- if anyone cares to, I’d be happy to spend hours discussing this film in the context of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (that is, as soon as I get my voice back). But The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser is something more. It has an emotional expanse rare for the filmmaker, becoming altogether, and unexpectedly, devastating as it reaches its astonishing and unforgettable closing scenes.

(Thursday's game is courtesy Reverse Shot at-large correspondent "Micky.")

It is now time for everybody's favorite game: "Apocalypto or Home Alone?"

If you have not seen either of these movies, you are not allowed to play, so STOP READING.

You know the rules, now tell me... is it Apocalypto or Home Alone?

1) A character screams and rubs his burning skin in a moment of levity.

2) Booby traps set up early in the film are set off at the end of the film, to hilarious result.

3) Macaulay Culkin exclaims "YES!"

4) Skinny main character gets into fights with his fat costar.

5) Jaguar Paw exclaims "NGABWE TUNMONGOW!"

6) Main character rescued at the last minute by strange white man.

7) Film is a poignant metaphor for modern day America.

8) Jungle cat eats a living human jawbone.

9) Man gets tarred and feathered.

10) Illustrates the importance of family.

11) Explores man's inhumanity to man.

Have at it. The winner will receive Mel Gibson's beard trimmings.

Whoa....what's in the water over there? The San Francisco Film Critics Circle gave out their awards today to a serious bunch of crap. Best Picture and screenplay to Todd Field's I Think This Is a Comedy, But I'm Not Sure, Best Foreign Film to Guillermo Del Toro's The Only Thing That Can Save Us from Franco's Vicious Dictatorship Is the Innocence of a Sweet Child, and Best Director to Paul Greengrass for his very special episode of 24. Tomorrow, get ready for the announcement of the Deluth Online Circle of Critics Association Awards and the Montpelier Movie Association of Broadcast Journalists. Will they give it to Helen Mirren?! Will it be another Scorsese-Eastwood head-to-header?!? Keep reading Reverseblog for all your year-end movie award needs.

Yes, it's that good. The National Bozos of Review this week seemed to have stumbled upon a good decision, giving Clint Eastwood's part two of his WWII duo, Letters from Iwo Jima, its best picture prize, while tossing Scorsese the director award for The Departed. Skeptics (understandably, considering the National Board's iffy history and dum-dum track record; a tad too cynical considering Eastwood's stellar recent track record) chalked it up to some Warner Bros. bed-snuggling....blah blah. Certainly the rest of that list is sheerly hilarious (Blood Diamond!!!), but now having seen Eastwood's film, there seems to be no question of its worthiness. We'll cover the film more in depth later on, but for all those gnashing their teeth to see how Eastwood handles this almost blindingly sensitive and somewhat unprecedented subject matter, your minds can be put to rest. Freed from the burden of Haggis-speak, Eastwood regains the intimacy he does so well: Letters from Iwo Jima is written by first-timer Iris Yamashita as a heart-wrenching crawl towards doom. The good intentions of Flags of Our Fathers were somewhat undermined by broad sketchiness and an overly fragmented narrative--Eastwood is best at narratives that move forward with deliberate inexorable tragedy (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) and that convey the passage of time in subtle, shadowy gestures. Iwo Jima is a war film that leaves the space for those moments, here between men, stranded and knowingly headed towards their own annhilation. Iwo Jima is a great human tragedy, neither too do-gooder nor agenda-driven (both the Japanese protagonists and the American enemies--the latter barely registering as characters, seen often from great distances--display both barbarism and mercy, alternately), a new viewpoint of an age-old story, one that most Americans have perhaps never thought of. It's both earnest and cunning in the way that it plays with Americans' conceptions of the Imperial Army, and it neither refutes nor justifies the knowledge we bring with us as viewers.

It's a precarious picture...an American director, fascinated by the notion of Japanese "honor" and patriotism, delves into history, trying to excavate a buried world for the edification of himself and his viewers...a lesser filmmaker, one who doesn't understand the importance of silence, the weight of violence, and the tenderness bred in isolation, would have exoticized these characters (played outstandingly by all, especially, Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Tsuyoshi Ihara). Miraculously, Eastwood falls into none of the traps.Those moments that seem indelibly "Japanese" (most involving the honor of suicide in wartime) register with tremendous emotional weight...to such an extent that the plight of the American soldiers in Flags seem as trivialities in comparison. Eastwood seems to have put his heart and soul into the crafting of this film, and his passion, empathy, and respect for his subject matter registers in nearly every frame. It's the American film of the year.

Not that we usually place much stock in the year-end choices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (thanks for the dis on A Lion in the House, fuckwits. Blindsight, anyone?), but it’s blindingly obvious that a few billion folks who aren’t us do, which is why it is occasionally worth lobbying, at least in a small way, for a favored long shot contender.

So here’s my vote, cast for one of the most breathtaking, daring, scary, and dexterous performances of the year: Laura Dern in Inland Empire. Long past her early nineties heyday of visibility (Wild at Heart, Rambling Rose, and Jurassic Park), Dern’s credits throughout the early aughts have thinned out a fair piece. While she’s taken roles in films like Happy Endings, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, and The Prizewinner of Defiance Ohio, it’s presumable that few took much notice as this batch floated in and out of theatres. With Inland she’s reunited with the director who gave her what’s perhaps her archetypal role (at least for me: Lula in Wild at Heart), and delivered an indescribably great performance in the face of a nearly inexplicable film.

Which begs the question: Will anyone spare the time in this crowded holiday/awards season to watch it? Inland Empire’s nearly three hours long, wildly experimental and ditches linear narrative convention fairly early in for a long stretch of subjective, dreamlike connections. It’s a film that dwells in incoherence while teasing audiences with the possibility of “answers,” yet somehow builds to a redemptive, emotional climax, without audiences ever really being able to grasp the stakes. This is due in many respects to Dern, who flits between characters, accents, and affects, following Lynch as he plumbs deeper and deeper into the multiverse that is his latest film. What other actress would agree to sign onto a project without a script shot on “toy cameras” (Lynch’s words) over a period of years with the possibility that no end product might ever result? Kudos for that, but what of an actress who pushes herself through a range of characters, a gurgling bloody death sequence, long stretches where she’s required to perform all the different shades of confusion, and, most horrifyingly for any performer, allowing her own face to be stretched and distorted into a kind of funhouse death mask at the film’s terrifying conclusion?

Dedication to craft abounds in Inland Empire, and not to knock current Academy frontrunner, Helen Mirren, whose performance in The Queen is another kind of lesson in chops, but I’ve always held a bit more admiration for those who cut memorable performances out of whole cloth than those working from a real-life base. (This is why Heath Ledger received my vote for 2005.) What’s miraculous about this supremely special, unique performance is that there’s no anchor in sight for Dern’s Nikka Grace except Dern herself.

For more on Inland Empire, easily one of the best of this sad, sad year, go here and here.

At Reverse Shot, we sometimes wonder how our classy core audience of Film Comment-reared cinephiles, ex Southern debutantes, reformed Evangelical homosexuals, and Michigan auto laborers first stumble upon our home site at www.reverseshot.com, which in January turns a staggering four years old. Well, according to our statistics, the search strings that bring the commoners, thirsty for the quench of smart-but-not-academic, and just slightly lusty, film criticism, vary wildly. Here's a collection of our own personal favorite examples of how our greatest googling fans came upon us.

Brown bunny blow job

Angela Lansbury

Little children spoiler

Ming tsai sexiest man alive

Politics in Breakfast on Pluto

women monster transformation into a werewolf

Soviet Kitsch

Matt Lauer haircut

Emmerich Day After Tomorrow Interview

Reverse Shot of sex

Super Size my fat

Crying Game shower scene [I interject…is there one?]

Nicole Kidman likes black men

why do frogs blow their throat up

Big fesses in the world

Memphis women killed while sleeping

Anti-Semitism Hitler

Jaye Davidson’s Penis

Lick my ass

I did your boyfriend

m.night shyamalan's the village is a depiction of 911

Armond White unleashed

Chainsaw porn

Clean sexy cunts

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and personal identity

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and interpersonal concepts

eternal sunshine of the spotless mine world forgotten

fight club fear of homosexual

hynes black comedian

nicholas pinkerton brooklyn death

pinkerton the dog

gay superman having gay porn

human language is like a cracked kettle

image of wine spilled in mission impossible iii

little children fucking in the ass

scarface tony montana tattoo

We're so proud. Look for another HOTTTTT edition of Reverse Shot coming this January!!

Really? All that's coming out this week are The Nativity Story, Turistas, and 10 Items or Less? Huh. Oscar season, this? In any case, there's other good news in the world of film, something we can all celebrate: Happy Birthday, Woody Allen! Yes, that tireless workhorse, whose only seeming competition in the amount of output (in terms of American filmmakers) just passed on last week, is turning 71 years old. I'm sure for Woody, a birthday is less a celebration than a painful peek into the abyss of his own mortality (just a guess!), so we'll do the rejoicing for him.

So everybody put aside your attacks and facile observations of the master's diminishing returns—this is a time to be thankful Allen is still letting his undying neuroses fuel his nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, and to hope it never has to come to an end. Being one of the few critics who seemed to unreservedly enjoy the goofy inconsequence of Scoop, as well as an admirer of the finely modulated genre mechanics and transparent misanthropics of Match Point, I find it hard to believe that this could really be called a valley in his career. Not feeling the need to further regurgitate all the defenses I've written in the past regarding Allen's placement as an essential American artist, his utter control over the temperaments over an entire generation of film writers and watchers, and the endlessly watchable body of work he continues to add to with stunning adeptness, I'll just leave these birthday wishes with an image from the set of his latest film, in which he's directing Ewan McGregor. 2006 might have been DOA, but at least there's something to look forward to in 2007.