Brittannia Hospital (1982, UK)

After watching If...., I bumped Brittannia Hospital to the top of my queue. Along with O Lucky Man!, it's a companion piece with the first movie, and touches on many of the same themes - British tradition, corrupted power structures, and anarchy and rebellion among the young and underpriviledged. In addition, Lindsay Anderson also turns his focus on the position of the media in society and the rise of technology, here represented by the medical field.

Malcolm McDowell returns as Mick Travis, though he's not expressly the same character as the Mick of If..... If anything, Brittannia turns out to be even weirder than If...., with subplots involving cannibalistic African dictators, reanimated corpses, and the Queen Mum. It's not quite as cohesive as If...., and lacks its impact and energy, but Brittannia is entertaining as a satirical, absurdist farce, and for a retrospective look at the anxieties of British society in the early 1980's and the technological advances of medical science.

The Simpsons Movie (2007, USA)

I really don't feel I have much at all to say about The Simpsons Movie apart from the fact that I found it pretty consistently hilarious, and that after all these years, it's somewhat surreal to see all of these familiar characters up on the big screen. The story is focused heavily on the family, which unfortunately cuts the involvement of minor characters, save for a few choice bits by Moe, Ralph, and Flanders. I sorely missed Kang & Kodos, but on the upside - Spider-Pig!

If.... (1968, UK)

This isn't entirely fair, but I'm going to write about If.... even though I still don't quite know what to think about it. I've been waiting to see If.... for at least 10 years now, maybe longer. It started with my teenage love of Malcolm McDowell, incepted with A Clockwork Orange, and then when I was about . . . fifteen? I caught a section of O Lucky Man! on cable. I didn't know what the fuck I was seeing, and it was basically impossible for me to find Man again, or to find If.... at all. Damn small-town video stores and the nascent interwebs.

Okay already - Criterion has finally issued a version of If...., and I have finally seen it. And now I'm even more irritated about the difficulty of finding Lindsay Anderson's other movies on DVD. If.... stars McDowell in his first film role, playing schoolboy anarchist Mick Travis, who leads his compatriots through a series of (mis)adventures, some of which are certainly less real than others. It's a horrifying look at English public school traditions, while simultaneously tapping right in to the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960's. It's a very interesting comparison with Zabriskie Point, which was filmed just a few years later. I don't want to describe If.... too much, as I just left a message board where people were pissed that they thought a reviewer had spoiled them. However, I will say that, again like Zabriskie, the final sequence is pretty shocking.

I've been reading a lot about how critically praised If.... has been, how it won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has landed near the top of a lot of U.K. film lists. Frankly, I'm going to need to see it again to really decide what I think about all of this. It's an incredibly dense film, especially considering Anderson's disrupted narrative style. But it certainly made me anxious to find more of his work.

Sunshine (2007, UK)

There's nothing particularly innovative or deep about Danny Boyle's Sunshine, but it's still one of the best S.F. genre films I've seen in quite some time. First off, it's utterly gorgeous - someone finally forgave Boyle for The Beach, and gave him a moderately large budget with which to create an unbelievably beautiful vision of the end of the world. The cinematography and visual effects alone are worth the ticket price, but the story and script are reasonably strong as well (though it does feel at times as if Boyle and Alex Garland are throwing in everything but the kitchen sink), and the cast is nearly as pretty as the relentless image of a blown-out Sun.

Part S.F. thriller and part haunted house movie, Sunshine does get caught up in itself a bit, but not so as to distract much from the relentless forward movement of the plot. Eight scientists are en route to the Sun with a very, very large bomb, hoping to cause a mini-supernova and keep the Earth from freezing. Ludicrous, of course (and, as I've mentioned before, not unlike an outer-space version of The Core), but the perfect recipe for things going very wrong, very fast. Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans play nicely off one another as two of the strongest leads in the ensemble, with Murphy's near-girlish prettiness and Evans's machismo providing two poles between which the fate of the mission swings. Things don't get terribly much deeper than that, but with a surface as pretty as Sunshine's, who cares?

Outside of the movie itself, there's something that bemuses me about Sunshine. The movie opened in exactly two theaters in the greater Chicago area. After the general popularity and success of 28 Days Later, and the critical praise surrounding Millions, why is it so hard to see Sunshine? True, there are no really big stars in the cast, but Murphy is familiar to U.S. audiences by now, and Evans has certainly been building a fanbase over the past 3 years or so. The marketing campaign surrounding the film has been abysmal, including a full-length trailer that practically gives the entire plot away. Fox seems to be dumping what could have been a sleeper hit if it had been pushed out on a wider scale - doubtless, given the film's general critical praise and the likelihood of it building on strong word-of-mouth, Sunshine will eventually gain a wider audience, but it's a bit infuriating to see Transformers playing on 37 local screens while Sunshine is stuck on 2.

Shooter (2007, USA)

Brainless action is one thing, but Shooter is just plain dumb. A conspiracy thriller that bores more than it thrills, Mark Wahlberg stars as an ex-Marine sniper recruited to do a shady bit of patriotic service. Obviously, everything goes pear-shaped in the first half hour, and Wahlberg's character (the awesomely named Bob Lee Swagger) is then chased across the country, forced to prove that he didn't try to kill the President of the United States.

The movie is so badly structured that the first half doesn't pay a bit of attention to the conspiracy at the center of the plot, choosing instead to front-load with chase scenes and over-the-top action sequences. The second half is then weighed down by a poorly-conceived screed on corruption in U.S. international policy. This turns out to be the most annoying aspect of Shooter - the lip service it pays to current political issues. While the president seemingly at the center of the assassination plot is an entirely anonymous figure, Swagger reads the 9/11 report, and continual mentions are made of the Iraq War and various U.S. atrocities committed in the name of freedom, some real, some not. What's the film's alternative to a self-perpetuating system of governmental corruption? Libertarian individualism, of course - that old American can-do spirit, represented here by living in a cabin in the woods with your guns and your dog. Yee haw.

While Wahlberg has the intensity to pull of the bulk of his role, he doesn't have the spark of humor of say, Bruce Willis or Nicholas Cage, actors who would have been able to insert a bit more humanity into Swagger. Michael Pena and Kate Mara work overtime to compensate, but it's beyond them to correct Wahlberg's inertness. Working with stronger directors, such as David O. Russell, P.T. Anderson, or even F. Gary Gray, Wahlberg can turn in a decent performance, but Antoine Fuqua didn't know how to make his lead's flatness work in the film's favor. However, there's certainly too much wrong with Shooter to lay all the blame at Wahlberg's door - Fuqua hasn't been able to follow up on the promise of Training Day, and at this point, it seems doubtful that he will.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007, USA)

As I've no doubt mentioned before, I love the Die Hard movies. #1 is surely the best, but #3 is my favorite for sheer, over-the-top ridiculous action and bad quips, and also because Sam Jackson's Zeus is such a fantastic foil for John McClane. Not to mention Jeremy Irons as the maniacal Simon (oh, what a world it would be if he and Alan Rickman really WERE brothers), one of the best original movie villains of the 90s.

All that being said, I was NOT excited by the concept of Live Free or Die Hard, primarily because I thought that the magic would certainly be gone by now, what with the introduction of a cyber-terror plot, nerdy young sidekick, and McClane's nubile daughter standing in for her mother as hostage extraordinaire. I also thought that Len Wiseman would be a poor substitute for John McTiernan, though I have to admit that I enjoyed the first Underworld movie, what with all the vampire vs. werewolf-fu.

Anyway, as it turns out, Live Free is the only summer action film I've bothered with yet, and I'm not sorry I did - it's a hell of a lot of fun, with some classic McClane attitude and lots of stuff blowing up real good. Most of the old-school action is really well-done, though I could have done without the final semi truck stunt, which took things a bit too far. Justin Long isn't nearly as irritating as I expected - I actually liked him for the first time since probably Galaxy Quest - and Lucy McClane (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is certainly her father's daughter. Timothy Olyphant doesn't have the heft of either Irons or Rickman, but honestly, who does? He and Maggie Q make a good pair all the same. Unfortunately, there's still no exciting way to film people staring intently at computer screens, and an R rating might have been a problem at the box office, but it certainly would have helped with the film's snappiness and its body count (McClane has never been shy about offing people before). There are way too many moments where you can tell that the actors have dubbed their lines to remove profanity. Hopefully, there will be an unrated cut available on DVD. In any case - not as good as #1 or #3, but much, much better than #2.

Seraphim Falls (2006, USA)

I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy kick lately, and since it’s another few months until No Country for Old Men arrives (sidenote – squee!), I thought that for the time being, Seraphim Falls might serve as a decent substitute. Starring Liam Neeson and an excellent Pierce Brosnan, the action takes place across the snowy hills and desert plains of the American West, as the two men play a protracted game of cat-and-mouse. The conceit is that for the majority of the film, the audience has no real idea what these men are in relation to one another, or why Neeson is so dogged in his pursuit of Brosnan – when the original tragedy finally comes to light in the third act, it becomes hard to separate good from evil.

On a whole, I found Seraphim to be a bit simplistic, but a very good chase film nonetheless. Some of the symbolism, particularly near the close, clashes with the realism of the larger story, and seems extraneous rather than organic. However, the action is excellent, as is the cross-section of the Old West that the two men periodically stumble upon. It must have been a brutal shoot (particularly for Brosnan), but well worth it.

Zabriskie Point (1970, USA/Italian)

I'll admit it - Zabriskie Point is my first Antonioni film. Perhaps an odd choice to start with, but it was brought to my attention by watching Los Angeles Plays Itself, which noted Antonioni's loving cinematography of Southern California in the late 1960s.

Zabriskie certainly is reverent of its setting - the Los Angeles parts reminded me of nothing so much as Ed Ruscha's early work, and are some of the most realistic depictions of L.A. city streets I've ever seen. The desert scenes are absolutely gorgeous, and if you're lucky, like I was, you'll see them on the big screen. Zabriskie is also reverent of its subject, the hippie/countercultre movement, even if it stands somewhat at a distance from it. I've seen a ton of films from and on the sixties, and I've got to say that Zabriskie just feels right - whether Antonioni is letting the camera move slowly around a campus revolutionary meeting or capturing a desert love-in, the atmosphere is tangible. A good thing, too, since the script is nothing to speak of (possibly because no less than 5 writers had a part in it), and the performances aren't any better.

So as not to spoil anyone, I won't get into the ending, except to say that though it came as something of a shock, and I'm still not entirely sure what it means, it might be one of the loveliest 5 minute sequences I've seen on the screen in a long time.

The Aura (2005, Argentinian)

Nine Queens is something of a favorite of mine - a fantastic contemporary heist film with the flair of one of the old Jean-Pierre Melville New Wave noirs packed into a contemporary South American setting. It saddened me a great deal to learn that Fabian Bielinsky, the director of Nine Queens, died not long after completing his second, and ultimately final, film, The Aura. Bielinsky had a great talent for composing taut, atmospheric crime thrillers, and his career would have been fascinating to track on a longer term. At the very least, however, he has left behind two films that should help keep the recent wave of new Latin filmmaking vibrant.

The Aura again stars the hangdog Ricardo Darin, whose performance here is so different than in Queens that I'm immediately queuing up any of his other available films on Netflix. Darin plays Esteban Espinosa, a very reserved taxidermist, who, apart from his brief spells of epilepsy, is remarkable only for his seemingly baseless knowledge of criminal matters. Standing in a payroll line with a co-worker, he explains a detailed - and seemingly entirely off-the-cuff - heist plan, calculated down to the minute. Esteban's theory is that most criminals aren't very good because they don't notice the details, don't plan carefully enough, and he finds himself with a chance to prove this soon enough.

As introspective as Queens is glib, The Aura showcases Bielinsky's own strengths at careful planning, though it never feels cold, thanks in large part to Darin, playing a very difficult role as a character who is almost completely inscrutable - Esteban's true motives may not even be known to Esteban. There's a lot going on here beyond the surface plot, and it's a shame that Bielinsky won't be around to develop his working relationship with Darin, or to expand his own talents into new genres. But at least we'll have these two films to admire.