Twitter buddies were, last week, angsting a bit about how the cultural touchstones we had growing up are gradually disappearing and losing their relevance. Ghostbusters and Back To The Future lasted much, much longer in terms of cultural relevance than most movies do, partially because of the rise of cosplay and conventions, partially because each of the two franchises stayed fresh and new for longer than average (Ghostbusters from the first film’s debut 1984 to 1991 when The Real Ghostbusters ended its run, Back to the Future from 1985 to 1993 (again, from first film to end of animated spinoff series). And partially it’s because both of these movies were in the right place at the right time with respect to cable stations adopting the “let’s buy a given number of movies and air them endlessly” strategy that lasted for most of the Nineties and Aughts; you could catch Ghostbusters and Back to the Future and a select number of other films practically once a week on the likes of TBS or AMC or whatever other movie channels were available to you on basic cable, and even non-movie channels ended up having movie nights because it was and is a cheap way to fill up airtime.

But now with the rise of digital delivery, that era is basically coming to its end. People are losing the habit of watching movies on TV or indeed on any schedule other than their own. Which: this is great in many ways, of course, because you get freedom and a la carte selection and all that sort of thing, and you watch movies on your own time and etc etc etc. But the cost of that is that cultural touchstones have their power diminished and their period of relevance shortened. Which means that we are witnessing the rise of the first generation of people since Back to the Future‘s inception that don’t understand references made to it; it is passing out, finally, of the cultural jargon. As most things do, of course. Ghostbuster as well. Hell, Willow is practically an antique. The Princess Bride is the one that seems to be sticking and I think that’s largely to do with it having had wide distribution on kid-focused cable networks over the last decade, but who knows how long that lasts?

All of which is to say: those kids today, and in fact people in their twenties even, are much less connected to the movies I loved growing up when I was younger. On the one hand this is sad, because those movies are awesome. On the other hand, it means that this particular series of columns has way more breadth, because movies I have never considered to be particularly obscure are now, in fact, becoming obscure! Hooray! Or not.

The Freshman was never really a cultural touchstone in the first place, and as time goes on it becomes less and less well-known. This is not because it is a bad movie: it isn’t. It’s a very good one. But it is a movie that relies greatly on a previous cultural touchstone itself, namely The Godfather and Marlon Brando’s performance in it, and while some might argue that The Godfather is timeless – no, it isn’t, because nothing is timeless, and most people today are more familiar with second- and third-degree references to The Godfather than the film itself. So increasingly I see people even my own age are completely unfamiliar with The Freshman, and that is a shame.

The basic plot is simple. Matthew Broderick is Clark, your titular freshman going to NYU, who arrives in New York and is immediately ripped off by Victor Ray (the late, great Bruno Kirby). Penniless and stuck, and with his horrible stepfather unwilling to help him out, Clark manages to track Victor down and Vic promises to make it up to him, despite having sold his stuff, by “getting him a job.” The job is working for Carmine Sabatini (AKA “Jimmy the Toucan”), who of course looks amazingly like Vito Corleone, although everyone explains to Clark not to mention this because Carmine is very sensitive about it. Carmine takes a liking to Clark, and offers to pay him to do some work for him…

…and then Clark has to pick up and deliver a Komodo dragon to an odd, out-of-the-way farm run by a crazed German (Maximillan Schnell).

…and then he’s introduced to Carmine’s beautiful daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller, having a ball with her character).

…and then he finds out Carmine has already told Tina that she and Clark are to be married, about which she is greatly enthusiastic.

…and then federal agents show up and tell Clark that the whole Komodo dragon delivery was the tip of a much larger thing.

…and this is about when he starts freaking out.

Those are your plot beats, but the sign that The Freshman is interested in being more than a simple caper comedy lies in the details. Indeed, many people upon hearing the plot are expecting a zany romp, but the movie isn’t really that interested in being zany the excellent bit with the Komodo dragon notwithstanding). It’s much more contemplative than that; still a comedy, to be certain, but a gentle one. Admittedly, it is gentle like the way Carmine is gently re-arranging Clark’s life without talking to him about it first. It doesn’t meander; everything is done with purpose and in its own time.

The Carmine/Clark relationship is the heart of this movie and what gives it dramatic heft. Carmine may be a mob boss or may not be (they hedge about this quite a bit), and he definitely has an iron will, but Carmine is clearly generous and loving as well. Late in the film, he goes to visit Clark and the two talk about children’s books, and Clark’s late father, and Carmine asks Clark to tell him one of his father’s poems, and it’s a wonderful, intimate little scene about a father with no son and a son who lost his father, both of whom clearly respect and like the other greatly, but who are also divided, at the moment, by little things like “being a mob boss” and “federal agents breathing down Clark’s neck” and even though these things are never mentioned they are addressed.

A lesser film would have simply indulged in Godfather references until the audience was mumbling “leave the guns take the cannoli” in their sleep, but this movie doesn’t go that route. Marlon Brando’s callback to Vito Corleone is only skin-deep; Carmine is a different character, a different person, and in this, Brando’s last great role, he manages to convey that difference while using all of Vito’s visual and audible tics. That Carmine looks like Vito is only the movie’s best running gag, and not its interior life. And this means you don’t have to see The Godfather first to appreciate The Freshman, because this movie isn’t about another movie. Honestly, so long as you know Vito Corleone exists, you will know enough to enjoy this flick.

The thing about biographical movies is that for the actors playing people who were actual Real People In History, and particularly for recent Real People, there is a fine line you have to walk between “this is who that person sounded like” and “this is who that person actually was.” People become famous for their verbal tics and how they generally hold themselves, but that’s not who they were, not when you get right down to it. Any person is infinitely more complex than their public persona, and a good actor works to capture the person’s interior life (as best they are able) and use that to bring out the public side of things.

Or they just say “fuck it” and go one way or the other.

Anthony Hopkins’ performance in Nixon is a good example of the second choice. It’s an amazing performance, all the moreso because Hopkins looks and sounds nothing like Richard Nixon. (This is all the more notable because Dan Hedaya shows up briefly in the film, and Hedaya’s similarity to Nixon is so pronounced it eventually led to him being cast as Nixon in the underrated comedy Dick.) Hopkins doesn’t bother trying to imitate Nixon because there wouldn’t be any point. Even his Welsh accent keeps cropping up in Nixon’s famous lines.

However, about twenty minutes into Nixon, something remarkable happens: you just forget about Hopkins being not-Nixon and instead completely buy into him as Nixon. It happens because Anthony Hopkins is a fucking great actor and concentrates on the driving forces that animated Nixon – he gets at the core of Nixon’s incredible sense of resentment that drove him, but also Nixon’s sense of superiority at the same time. But Hopkins’ Nixon is resolutely human rather than simply a one-dimensional monster. Hopkins’ Nixon doesn’t just seek dominance but approval: the scene where Nixon tries to engage with the protestors at the Lincoln Memorial is framed by Stone as simply tragic, a microcosm of the larger tragedy that was Nixon’s wasted potential (one of the smartest Presidents ever, but see what use that intelligence went to); his sense of superiority is driven at least in part by his strong sense of loyalty (he is resolutely faithful to his wife). Hopkins’ Nixon is flawed, but sympathetic, and to make Nixon a sympathetic figure rather than a devil is the stronger artistic choice.

Of course, Hopkins is backed up by a fucking murderer’s row of acting talent: Joan Allen, James Woods, Powers Boothe, Paul Sorvino, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, David Hyde Pierce, and J.T. Walsh as, respectively, Pat Nixon, Bob Haldeman, Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, E. Howard Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover, John Dean and John Erlichman. But wait: there is more: David Paymer, Kevin Dunn, Mary Steenburgen, Saul Rubinek, Madeline Kahn, Edward Herrman – even John C. McGinley makes an appearance at the top of the film in a fake “school career” educational film. (Don’t ask me to explain why Stone decided that had to be in there. It’s metaphorical somehow, though, you can be sure of that. Still, Oliver Stone is inscrutable.) Interestingly, most of these actors go more to the “impersonation” school than Hopkins does (Sorvino’s Kissinger is particularly dead-on), but that choice actually grounds Hopkins’ method – by surrounding him with actors doing more faithful interpretations of the people they’re portraying, his un-Nixon Nixon gradually becomes “real” because he’s constantly interacting with more genuine-ish articles.

But ultimately Nixon is about a man’s relationship with power – it is not for nothing that Stone (who is not a subtle person, really) begins by quoting the Bible (“what hath a man gained, if he hath lost his soul?”) and then spends twenty minutes exploring Nixon’s horrible, horrible childhood and his horrible parents who didn’t love him and how this forged Nixon into a man who resented those who were loved (Kennedy more than anybody) and envied that love and was never sure if he had it – not even from his wife – and so sought power above all. It’s a far more entertaining trip to the dark side than George Lucas ever envisioned (and yes, of course Lucas wrote Star Wars with Nixon metaphors firmly in mind) and far more complex and realized. When Stone directed W., he made George W. Bush out to be a pawn in other people’s games; Stone’s Nixon, on the other hand, knows exactly what he’s playing and why.

NOTE: This was the third of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wire tripped? No? A virgin brain. Well, we’re gonna start you off right. This isn’t like “TV, only better.” this is life. Yeah, this is a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there! You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it! You’re feeling it! It’s about the stuff you can’t have, right? Like running into a liquor store with a .357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenaline pumping through your veins.

Strange Days foresaw a lot about the future when it first came out.

Not the “jacking in” thing, where people get addicted to reliving copies of brainscanned memories on laserdisc – although in 1993, people didn’t really have an idea of what net.addiction was just yet, and in some ways Strange Days‘s conceit of becoming addicted to living somebody else’s life presages, in many ways, World of Warcraft, Second Life and similar online pursuits, and heck let’s just toss Youtube on there as well while we’re at it because you know there are people using it to relive old memories they probably shouldn’t. So hell, let’s count that as a prediction for Strange Days. But let’s also count its prediction of the rise of a Tupac Shakur-like rapper with similar cult following after his violent death, its depiction of a society with the killer mix of ever-growing social stratification combined with ideological and cultural divisions in the underclass, its recognition that the growing fusion of hip-hop, pop and metal would only continue, and its understanding that Tom Sizemore looks really freaky and awesome in a wig. Okay, that last one isn’t really a prediction, but come on. He looks freaky and awesome in a wig.

You know how I know it’s the end of the world? -Everything already been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every kind of government’s been tried, every fucking hairstyle, bubble gum flavors, you know, breakfast cereal… What are we going to do? How are we going to make another thousand years? I’m telling you, man, it’s over. We used it all up.

But Strange Days is great for reasons other than its often impressive precognitive abilities. It’s got Angela Bassett in what I would argue is her definitive movie role and one of the baddest-ass female action hero roles ever, which by itself makes the entire catalogue of Angelina Jolie look wussy. It teaches us the secret of making Juliette Lewis tolerable, which is to have her sing rather than speak (seriously: the movie’s major flaw is that Lewis’ appeal to Ralph Fiennes is only evident when she’s singing). It has a killer supporting cast: Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D’onofrio, William Fichtner, Glenn Plummer. It has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack that sounded in 1993 like what the future of music would sound like, and to an extent still does. It has one of the most beautiful and heartfelt endings I’ve ever seen in a movie, and begins with what I still hold up to be one of the greatest cold opens in film history (which, lest we forget, was filmed long before lightweight digital cameras were available, and thus had to be filmed entirely on full-sized Steadicams):

You’re just calmly backstroking along in the big toilet bowl and somehow you never let it touch you. I mean, between working vice and your current so-called occupation, you must have seen every kind of perversion. But you’re just like… some teflon man, you still come out this goofball romantic.

And it has Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero, the protagonist, and this is great because Ralph Fiennes rarely gets to be the hero of a story that isn’t staggeringly tragic – seriously, almost all of his major roles have been either villains (Voldemort, Amon Goth, Hades, Harry Waters in In Bruges) or heroes who have to suffer unimaginably (see The English Patient, Sunshine, The Constant Gardner, The End of the Affair – one could go on). Lenny, on the other hand, is a straight-up hero. Maybe a flawed one (after all, he is an ex-cop who’s also the future-equivalent of a drug dealer who is obviously obsessed with his ex-girlfriend), and certainly not your traditional action lead (Lenny openly admits he’s a talker rather than a fighter – he oozes good-natured smarm in a way that just makes you root for him), but he’s the hero here, and it’s just so great to see Fiennes for once straight-up play the good guy and do it so well. (Of course, shortly after Strange Days Fiennes unfortunately signed on to play John Steed in The Avengers, and although he was the best thing about that movie, it basically killed him as a heroic lead. So in Strange Days we are essentially seeing Fiennes in a position he would never be in again.)

This tie cost more than your entire wardrobe. It’s the one thing that stands between me and the jungle.

I am shying away from discussing the plot, and this is not because the various plot twists (and yes, of course there are plot twists) are so crucial to enjoying the film that being spoiled of them would ruin the film. (At least one of them most viewers, I expect, will see coming their first time out.) I’m refraining from discussing it because, although the plot is perfectly good, Strange Days relies on character and performance to see it through to the end, and does so with skill and grace. Kathryn Bigelow was decades away from her long-deserved Oscar at this point, but she’s always been a muscular presence behind the camera and this film is no exception: there’s nothing wasted in this, not for a second, and the direction never bores nor grows incoherent. She’s too good to let that happen.

One man’s mundane and desperate existence is another man’s Technicolor.

Strange Days is a wonderful mix of pessimism and optimism, of action and drama and mystery and sci-fi (and some truly funny bits, although it is by no means a comedy). It is also an extended analogy about the Rodney King riots and the sometimes tenuous bond between police and society as a whole. And while it does very few things perfectly, it does many things very well.

And did I mention that soundtrack?

NOTE: This was the second of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Loser was just further evidence that Jason Biggs’ career was over before it even started, which is kind of a shame because Jason Biggs has always been one of those actors who deserved better than he got: what he got, sadly, was “hey, it’s that guy who had sex with the pie in American Pie.” It didn’t help that beyond the Pie franchise he made some truly wretched choices: Boys and Girls and Saving Silverman is a one-two punch of horrible that could kayo most careers, but then Biggs made the poor decision to go ahead and appear in Jay and Silent Bob as himself and let Kevin Smith mock his only real achievement. And American Pie was an achievement for Biggs, because he played a dorky character without a shred of self-consciousness and thus made said dork a hero. It’s not something to be ashamed of, or run away from – it is something to be owned.

Loser follows suit as Biggs plays to his strength: he is the title character, a giant dork from the sticks named Paul who’s going to NYU and who just doesn’t fit in with mean big city life. Of course, in his native environment, he is widely admired by friends and family who think he’s just the greatest guy ever (Dan Aykroyd makes a brief cameo as his dad, giving him advice: “remember, son, interested is interesting“). But in New York City, he is just another schmoe, and unfortunately for him, he truly is a massive dork. Of course, the film goes in a farcical direction by having his roommates be wholly awful human beings: roofie-using date-rapist trust-fund babies who, while amusing, might as well be wearing HATE ME signs around their necks. Similarly terrible as a person is his professor, played by Greg Kinnear in full-on smarm mode, and who is dating the girl he likes, Dora, played by Mena Suvari. (Who is another “whatever happened to…” actor, having last appeared that I can remember in the not-very-good Day of the Dead remake, which was only notable for having Ving Rhames star in a second Romero-remake after Dawn of the Dead but as a totally different character.)

What makes Loser work, for me at least, is that it is honest about New York, which means being honest about great cities generally. It acknowledges that New York is an exciting place, filled with culture and vitality and unpredictability in a way that Paul’s hometown will never qute have. But it does this at the same time as it acknowledges that part and parcel of that vibrancy that cities have is a nasty streak, and by that I don’t mean to refer to Paul’s horrible roommates or teacher, who are stock villains; instead I refer to the fact that, when Paul and Dora go about town on their date, they are flat broke and have to figure out how to do things for free – sneaking into theatres at intermission, tooling around art galleries without paying, snagging a loaf of bread without paying (how very Les Miserables). The city might let them abide, but it is not greatly sympathetic to them, and this is an honest thing to say about any city, let alone one as romanticized as New York.

Loser doesn’t play up Paul’s decency to mirror off of his foils’ worthlessness; it doesn’t have to do that. All Loser does is present two reasonably nice people in a not-nice world, and have at it with them without pandering, and treat them generally with respect while surrounding them with a cynical, cruel world. They survive, of course – this is a comedy. But it has grit to it which I like.

NOTE: This was the first of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Still Crazy came out in 1999, did mediocre box office at best (I checked Boxofficemojo and it made less than half a million dollars in the USA, and not much more in the UK), got good reviews and a couple of Golden Globe nominations (for best comedy/musical and best original song) and then faded into relative obscurity. This is a pity, because Still Crazy‘s main sin as a movie is that it apparently came out at the wrong time.

After all, it has Bill Nighy in an extremely Bill Nighy sort of role, but five years before Bill Nighy really broke through as Bill Nighy in Love Actually (and whatever you may think of that film, it let Bill Nighy be Bill Nighy), and in Still Crazy Bill Nighy basically plays the same character as in Love Actually except this time he’s not a cariacature. It’s about 70s glam rock, but came out one year after Velvet Goldmine, a wildly overpraised and overly serious take on the same subject. (Still Crazy also has original songs – and good ones – rather than a pastiche soundtrack that sounds like somebody’s mixtape.) It’s a comedy about getting old, maybe six or seven years before Boomers really started realizing that they were getting old and made Nancy Meyers rich as a result.

And it’s really a great little movie, chock-full of great performances from Nighy, Stephen Rea, Timothy Spall, Juliet Aubrey and Billy Connolly. See, Strange Fruit were really big in the 70s, but twenty years later, like so many other bands, they’re a musical footnote, just another band which feuded endlessly and collapsed under its own weight. But when a nostalgic music exec who’s putting together a memorial show of a famous 70s concert – the concert where the Fruit broke up permanently – spots Stephen Rea’s former keyboardist Tony working in a resort, he suggests an appearance by the Fruit at the memorial concert, and of course that means Getting The Band Back Together.

Except, of course, it’s never that simple in real life, and one of the nice things about Still Crazy is that although it’s got plenty of the requisite old guys’ reunion/on-the-road wacky comedy, it never lets things be simple or cut and dry. Brian, the former lead guitarist, is missing and presumed dead, so the band has to recruit a new young guy to replace him because Ray, the lead singer, can’t really both sing and play lead guitar at the same time. Tony’s been carrying a torch for Karen, the former roadie and now manager, for practically ever, but she’s still in love with the memories of Brian and can’t shake them. Les, the bassist, still resents Ray because Ray came over after the band’s original singer Keith died of an overdose, and because Les never got to sing any songs back in the day. Les and Beano, the drummer, are still both nostalgic for Keith and can’t shake the idea that the band died with him. Ray’s quietly terrified that, despite being the richest of the Fruit thanks to a reasonably lucrative singles career, he’s only ever going to be a musical footnote. Oh, and Beano is being pursued by the revenue service for unpaid taxes, because it is still a wacky comedy.

And throughout the movie, death is an omnipresent force. These guys are old now, in their minds if nothing else – they’re on the road trying to rock out in their late forties and early fifties. They can’t help but feel slightly ridiculous, and worse they’ve got dead bandmates hanging over their shoulders. They’re grabbing desperately at their one last chance for real musical relevance and to be remembered, and they know it’s desperate and they’re doing it anyway, because it really is their last chance, not just to be musical stars but to grow old on their own damn terms, which is something many people never get to do at all. And because this is something we all want for ourselves in our own way, that’s why it’s good –

– along with the songs, which are excellent.

– and the performances, which are great.

– and the gags, which are really funny without being forced.

Yes, I know, I’m a guest contributor and I’m totally hijacking one of MGK’s personal topics, but how can I resist the lure of the giant soapbox? It’s a chance to tell large numbers of people to go see a movie I like, and you will all listen to me oh the POWER MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! In case that doesn’t clarify, let me stress again: I’m not MGK. If you have seen this movie, and do not think it is good, don’t blame him for my opinions. Oh, and also, you clearly hate babies and puppies and things that are awesome and are probably a Twilight fan or something.

So, on to Slither. Slither was a 2006 horror-comedy (with the emphasis on horror) written and directed by James Gunn, a horror veteran who got his start writing for Troma Films. His profile had been seriously raised by his screenplay for the Dawn of the Dead remake, and it wasn’t too surprising that he eventually got a shot at directing his own feature. It was, perhaps, a little surprising that he wound up making a film that was such an unabashed throwback to the splatstick horror movies of the early 80s; at the time, horror fans accused him of ripping off Night of the Creeps, but that misses the point. Slither isn’t ripping off any particular 80s horror movie any more than Metallica was ripping off any particular heavy metal band. They just knew they liked the sound and made it their own.

In the same way, Slither takes the tropes of splatstick (physical comedy, combined with grotesque body-horror) and makes them its own. Human beings bloat up like balloons as they gobble down vast quantities of rotting meat, only to be consumed from within by slugs that then jump down people’s throats and burrow into their brains…all so that they can proceed to deliver a speech about marital fidelity in perfect unison. Then spit acid at people. It’s the kind of unabated, disturbing freakishness that requires an R-rating to deliver…and unlike the vast majority of horror films of the last decade, Slither doesn’t water down its horror to cater to a PG-13 audience. This is the kind of movie you used to have to sneak into, back in the day; unfortunately for Slither‘s box office, it’s harder to do that now.

But Slither has more than just gross-out comedy and startle moments going for it; the film has a charming cast of characters that make you genuinely root for them, aided in no small part by the cast. Gunn went for character actors over stars (at this point, I will remind you that there’s an entire comments section in which to debate my labeling of star Nathan Fillion as a “character actor”.) Gregg Henry, one of those quintessential “nobody remembers his name, but everyone remembers his face and performance” actors, makes you delight in every narrow escape of the sleazy mayor as things go from bad to worse (to worse to worse to worst.) And Michael Rooker gives a great performance in a thankless role, taking the thoughtless husband who becomes the host of an alien parasite and making him sympathetic even under a metric fuckton of prosthetics.

But most importantly, Slither is sneakily subversive about the tropes it’s borrowing. Characters constantly behave just a little different than you expect them to in a movie like this; the teenage girl who might as well have Obvious Victim written on her forehead turns out to be a smart, determined survivor, and the brutish heel who’s destined to turn into a monster winds up having a sweet, decent streak in him that you only find out about just before things go bad. The movie’s subversive streak can be summed up in a single scene: One of the characters, having been turned into a breeder for brain-slugs, begs Fillion to kill him. Before you have more than a second to anticipate the traumatic, brutal decision he has to make, Fillion whips out his gun and blows the guy’s brains out. Because jeez, did you see what he looked like?

Unfortunately, Slither bombed at box offices (in no small part because the perfect audience for a splatstick horror movie is sixteen year-old boys, and they’ve cracked down a lot on sneaking into R-rated movies since the golden days of the 80s.) But movies like this are destined to do better as cult DVD hits, building up their reputation through word of mouth and devoted fans. I know I’ve had to practically force a couple of horror fans to sit down and watch it; afterward, one of them said, “Slither is this generation’s Evil Dead II.” High praise, indeed.

And if none of that convinces you, I will say that this movie has the single best karaoke scene ever committed to film. Seriously, I would watch a full 90 minutes of that woman singing karaoke. I’d describe it, but…it has to be seen to be believed. Just like Slither.

Christmas movies mostly suck. Miracle on 34th Street gives me hives. It’s A Wonderful Life is a depressing story told the wrong way. About half of the Christmas Carol adaptations completely miss the point (the exceptions: Muppet, Disney, Sim and the recent Zemeckis). Even a A Christmas Story gets more treacly and unbearable every year. (I will admit to a fondness for Love Actually, but what makes the film bearable are the bitter moments where things don’t work out. Plus Rowan Atkinson’s cameos.)

This is because Christmas is equal parts joyful and depressing. The good Christmas movies understand this, which is why most of the good Christmas movies are dark: black comedies about the human spirit’s capability for love even under the most degraded of circumstances, like Bad Santa, or hyperactive Dickens-on-crack stories like Scrooged, and Gremlins, which isn’t really a Christmas movie per se but come on, it’s Gremlins.

“I had this dream -”
“Do we have to do dreams?”
“I’m in this restaurant, and the waiter brings me my entree. It was a salad. It was Lloyd’s head on a plate of spinach with his penis sticking out of his ear. And I said, ‘I didn’t order this.’ And the waiter said, ‘Oh you must try it, it’s a delicacy. But don’t eat the penis, it’s just garnish.'”
“Lloyd, what do you think about the dream?”
“I think she should stop telling it at dinner parties to all our friends.”

But my favorite Christmas movie is far and away The Ref, because The Ref manages to be a very funny Christmas comedy without needing a super-ridiculous dose of silliness or lunacy beyond the everyday mundane madness of human life.

The plot is simple: Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey are married, and they hate each other. But they don’t just hate each other. That would be simplistic. They each hate what they’ve become – a suburbanite couple stuck in Fuckall, Smugachusetts, essentially living off his mother’s largesse – and they’re both depressed as all hell. And there’s nobody else to blame it on except themselves and each other, so naturally, as many couples do in these situations, they’ve opted for both. They’re miserable and planning a divorce.

This is when Denis Leary shows up. At this point in his career, Leary was already starting to transition away from his well-known “asshole” standup persona, most likely because it obviously bored the shit out of him. He goes on a couple of Learyesque rants through the picture because it’s expected, but he’s not playing Denis Leary – he’s inhabiting his character, a tired aging burglar who hates his life nearly as much as Spacey and Davis hate theirs.

“From now on, the only person who gets to yell is me. Why? Because I have a gun. People with guns get to do whatever they want. Married people without guns – for instance, you – do not get to yell. Why? NO GUNS! No guns, no yelling. See? Simple little equation.”

And so, a hostage situation – starting with the married couple, and extending to their son, home from military academy for the holidays – gradually becomes both an extended drier-than-brut-champagne farce as Leary pretends to be a couples counsellor at Davis and Spacey’s family Christmas celebration, and the trigger event for a series of long-overdue bouts of honesty. Ted Demme (who never made another movie as good as this one, although Beautiful Girls came close) builds up tension slowly until Davis and Spacey finally just blow both their stacks and explode at one another in a way you know they never have, and the genius of their respective performances is that you really get that these are two people who really love one another despite everything, and who’ve completely lost how to tell the other that.

But just summing it up like that makes the movie sound boring. And it’s not boring. It’s fucking hilarious. There is an evil dog and a drunk Santa and a useless sidekick and inept small-town deputies. There are more killer performances in this movie than many movies have cast members – not just Davis and Spacey and Leary (every one excellent), but also one of the great Glynis Johns’ last (and most memorable) roles, plus ever-reliables like Christine Baranski and J.K. Simmons. And, as a special bonus, you get to see a great pair of underappreciated character actors – Robert Ridgely, the king of smarm, and Raymond Barry, normally stuck in “military advisor” gigs – use their chops in what’s arguably the best scene of the entire movie.

“That’s not the spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is either you’re good, or you’re punished and you burn in hell.”

Someone, I forget who, once said that family are the only people who can tear you down and build you up at the same time. This movie’s all about that. Which is why it’s a classic.

“Sylvester Stallone in a comedy” should rightly raise warning bells. Warning sirens. Some loud noise of some kind, indicating danger. After all, Stallone’s track record for comedies is dismal, to say the least. (Six words: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!) But every so often, the stars align just so, and what should be a disaster is surprisingly non-disastrous and even pretty entertaining.

This is not to say that Oscar is a perfect comedy. It isn’t. It’s broad. It’s not exactly subtle. And while Sly tries his best (and doesn’t do badly), he’s never going to be Groucho Marx or even Chico, and a comedy like this – a farce, a comedy of errors with a strong emphasis on wordplay – is not really his forte. Plus, there are a couple of supporting performances that just kind of make you wonder things. Like “how did Marisa Tomei ever make it when she started out so poorly?”

“When I took over, your books were a mess.”
“They don’t sound like they’re in no great shape now! …damn, that’s a double negative.”

But it’s just a likable little movie. It has Tim Curry in it, before he was seemingly permanently exiled to play villains for video games, being Tim Curry and therefore completely awesome. It has a great performance from Chazz Palmintieri as a big goon mobster. (I defy anyone to not laugh when Stallone demands he shed all his weapons, and Palmintieri gives sad puppy eyes as he leaves a pile of weapons on a counter, culminating in a spiked ball-and-chain.) It had a whole horde of great character actors at their best: Peter Reigert as a smart-mouthed mobster-turned-butler, William Atherton as a snooty banker, Kurtwood Smith as a moral but not-too-bright cop, Harry Shearer as one half of a pair of quirky Italian tailors, and the late, great Eddie Bracken as a police snitch. It’s got a great cameo by Kirk Douglas and an appearance by Don Ameche in one of his last roles. And it’s got a remarkably clever plot.

“Even in the old days he was known as an honest crook.”
“That’s an oxymoron.”
“Gee, you shouldn’t oughta said that, Doc.”
“Yeah, leave Connie alone. He does the best he can.”

Stallone plays Angelo “Snaps” Provolone, a mobster who promises his dying father he’ll go straight. To this end, he has liquidated his criminal enterprises and plans to buy his way into a bank partnership. However, on the day the papers are to be signed, his young accountant (Vincent Spano, who for a while in the late 80s and early 90s was looking like a big thing, but unfortunately fizzled) comes to him and requests the hand of his daughter in marriage. However, his daughter is in love with the chauffeur, Oscar, and is a bit of a brat who wants to get her way. The cops, suspicious of Snaps’ sudden cessation of criminal activity, are suspicious, and watching his house like hawks. So is a rival gang, looking to muscle in on Snaps (who now appears weak).

“I got it! Your daughter’s not your daughter, and the cash that used to be the jewels is now your underwear!”

And then it all starts to get complex. Because the young accountant hasn’t actually ever met Snaps’ daughter. And things rapidly start to spiral out from one misunderstanding; that’s how a comedy of errors works, see, little things ball up into bigger things and bigger and bigger and then – pow, the payoff. And the good thing about Oscar is that the comedic payoff is an excellent one, all things considered. It’s a fun, hammy comedy, the sort of film Hollywood genuinely doesn’t make anymore because it’s gloriously, unapologetically pre-ironic and we live in a post-ironic world.

Plus, Tim Curry as an elocution teacher. Come on.

“What’s the most important thing in life?”
“Respect.”
“Too dependent on other people.”
“Love?”
“A little Disneyland, isn’t it?”
“God’s will.”
“Close.”
“What is it then?”
“Necessity.”
“As in?”
“As in people do what is most necessary to them at any given moment.”

The 90s were actually a pretty damn good decade for movies, but even given the richness of the decade there have been any number of overlooked gems. Three Kings is probably the biggest. I went looking for top ten lists of 90s movies and after an hour on Google, Three Kings does not show up on a single one of them. For the sake of comparison, Kingpin shows up twice; Titanic, four times. American Beauty, Sam Mendes’ overwrought and overblown tribute to the spiritual death of suburbia, appears on countless lists of this sort despite it being rather crap. So does Saving Private Ryan, a movie which is technically brilliant at portraying battle but hardly one that says anything especially profound. (“Hey, did you know war is hell? And it’s violent?”) Dances With Wolves makes a lot of lists, and I wouldn’t say that’s a bad movie but it’s not exactly top ten list material, you know? And of course the usual suspects – Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, Unforgiven, Fargo, Pulp Fiction and The Silence of the Lambs – make sure that top ten slots are hotly contested.

Three Kings won no major awards; it made about $60 million at the box office, which was sort of respectable in the break-even sense, but far from noteworthy. It tends to float under the radar, and out of top ten list range – and as time progresses I’m discovering more and more people who haven’t seen it.

“What would you feel if I bombed your wife?”
“Worse than death.”
“Yes, my friend. Worse than death.”

All of that having been said, there is no reason this should be the case. Three Kings is one of the unsung masterworks of the Nineties; morally and ethically complex, and similarly astute without being preachy. The setting (the first Iraq War) is one that hasn’t been overused in the slightest (the only other Gulf War movie I can think of is Courage Under Fire, and that one kind of sucks). The plot (a small group of American soldiers try to steal some of Saddam’s gold and get caught up in the Shi’ite rebellions in the southern tip of Iraq) isn’t cookie-cutter, the cinematography (giving everything a washed-out feel) is bleakly apropos, and the dialogue clever and well-tuned.

“Are we shooting?”
“What?”
“Are we shooting?”
“…are we shooting?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!”
“…what’s the answer?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”

And the performances are uniformly excellent. George Clooney turns in what was one of two game-changing performances for him (the other being Out of Sight) as Archie Gates, a guy who really wants to be an amoral mercenary just this once, but discovers – much to his obvious chagrin – that he just can’t step aside. Mark Wahlberg’s everyman corporal is exactly right, and as his hysteria and exhaustion ramp up through the course of the film you can really get a sense of someone who never had it that easy to begin with finally finding out how desperate life can really get. Ice Cube’s Chief Elgin is Ice Cube being a moral, upright, total badass, which is what Ice Cube does best. And Spike Jonze – who hasn’t acted in a movie since – absolutely steals the fucking movie as the stupidly gentle redneck Private Vig. Jonze is so good it makes you wonder why he doesn’t act more, and the only answer I’ve ever figured that makes sense is that he wanted to try it out and see what acting was like.

“Lord knows what kind of vermin live in the butt of a dune coon.”
“Why do you let this cracker hang around with you, man?”
“He’s all right, man. He’s from a group home in Dallas. He’s got no high school.”
“Don’t tell people that…”
“I don’t care if he’s from Johannesburg. I don’t want to hear “dune coon” or “sand nigger” from him or anybody else.”
“Captain uses those terms.”
“That’s not the point, Conrad. The point is that “towelhead” and “camel jockey” are perfectly good substitutes.”
“Exactly!”

The four soldiers drive the film’s action, but every performance in this film is dead-on. Jamie Kennedy’s dumbass grunt and Nora Dunn’s veteran journalist are both great little performances, and Judy Greer turns in a wonderful little cameo as a slutty TV reporter, but the real meat of the supporting cast comes from two of Hollywood’s go-to Arab-looking guys: Cliff Curtis (who’s actually a New Zealand Maori, but has played so many Arab characters it’s kind of crazy) as the Shi’ite rebel and Said Taghmaoui (a genuine for-real Arabic person, albeit one born in France) as the Iraqi army interrogator. Curtis matches Clooney (one of the truly great movie stars of our time) presence for presence whenever they share the screen; Tahgmaoui’s scene with Wahlberg when the two talk about their respective baby daughters (one living, one not) never lets the viewer go.

“Any questions?”
“Yeah, is it true to be special forces, you gotta cut off an enemy’s ear?”

But what really sets Three Kings isn’t its great performance or story; it’s the fact that this is the rare movie that just about perfectly blends drama and action. Most movies that attempt to combine the two end up being dramas with a soupcon of action (No Country For Old Men) or are action movies that have a stronger than average dramatic core for the genre (Saving Private Ryan). Three Kings, in comparison, shifts gears from action to drama (with occasional sidereels into comedy) repeatedly without ruining the tone or feeling schizophrenic; it does this by diving deeply into the surreality of war and using its weirdness to accomodate everything David O. Russell wanted the movie to do.

“What happened to the Jesus fire, Doc?”
“It’s around you right now, man. It works on this side or the other side.”
“You never told me that part. I guess I could go to one of them shrines that erase the bad you did…”
“We made the right choice today, Conrad.”
“We did good, right?”
“We made the right choice.”

In short, it should be on more top ten lists.

Top comment: Said Taghmaoui is actually Berber, not Arab. — Distantfred

Comedies, as a rule, do not age well. Good comedies are plagarized endlessly until nobody laughs at the gags because they’ve already seen them on The Simpsons, and if not, simply become dated as senses of humour shift. Bad comedies are just bad and remain bad. It takes a truly timeless comedy to remain funny decades later – A Night At The Opera, Some Like It Hot, A Shot In The Dark, Animal House – and they are few and far between.

However, comedies, over time, can transform. The Apartment, for example, hasn’t aged particularly well in terms of its humour, but its romantic aspect is strong enough that now it works better as a lighthearted, clever romance (as opposed to a laugher with a romantic plot). For most comedies, this is the eventual goal: redefinition into another genre or success on grounds other than the pure hilarity they can’t, for whatever reason, manage.

The Man In The White Suit, made in 1951, is an excellent example of a comedy redefining itself as time passes. Modern audiences, honestly, won’t find it particularly funny – but it’s smart, and engaging, and clever.

The story of the film is that of an inventor named Sidney Stratton, played by Alec Guiness (yes, that Alec Guiness – he started out as a comedic lead). Sidney is obsessed with a mysterious discovery, so much so that his demeanour at times becomes almost sinister as he pursues his goal. Eventually we learn that Sidney’s plan is to invent a superstrong fabric that never wears out and repels dirt. And one day, he finally does it – and promptly has a white suit (he can’t figure out how to make the fabric hold dye) made from the fabric. (Which he has to cut with a blowtorch.)

All of this would prove decent enough comic fodder, but the reason The Man In The White Suit works is because everybody in the movie except for Sidney has an admirable degree of common sense as regards their own livelihoods. The textile mill owners want Sidney’s invention suppressed because they can’t make enough money off suits that never wear out. The textile mill workers want Sidney’s invention suppressed because they realize once everybody has enough clothes made from the new fabric, they’ll all be out of work. (This actually leads to one of the best plot developments in the movie, as Sidney desperately manages to escape from the owners holding him hostage only to be caught by the workers, who think the owners are going to screw them – until everybody realizes what page everybody else is on.)

Guiness plays Sidney perfectly, a near-Aspergin’ level of obsession and lack of social experience without any hint of malice or bad manners; for most of the movie Sidney honestly hasn’t any idea why everybody is so panicked about his invention. He’s focused on the big picture: when everybody has indestructible clothes, Life Will Be Better. And in the long run he’s right, of course, but nobody is going to be comforted by the long run and he can’t understand that, and Guiness brilliantly makes it obvious that his lack of understanding has nothing to do with arrogance or stupidity but simple innocence.

So thus we have a movie, originally a comedy, but now far more of a low-tech sci-fi movie, or alternately a parable about progress and science; it works on both levels. The performances remain intelligent and nuanced, the story remains engaging. It’s just not as funny as people once found it, and the ending doesn’t quite match the tone a modern viewer will find in it (although it’s not completely off, either). But that doesn’t mean it’s not still relevant, in its way.

One thing movies tend to do for the most part really badly is portray realistic geniuses. I mean geniuses, not just smart people. The people whose brains run on different tracks. Almost uniformly these characters get slotted into two tracks: the comic relief nerd (Egon in Ghostbusters) or the crazy savant (for example, the horrifically bad A Beautiful Mind). Worst of all is the tortured genius genre, wherein the filmmakers take pains to make sure we all understand how tortured the genius in question is, merely because he’s a genius. How persecuted a genius must be!

Zero Effect is that rare accomplishment: a movie about a tortured genius that avoids cliche, easy answers, and mawkish sentimentalism. It’s also very entertaining on a quiet, subtle scale; the dialogue crackles and the plot is brilliant. It also manages to portray the fact of being a genius in an original, compelling way.

Darryl Zero (Bill Pullman) is the aforementioned genius – the “world’s greatest private detective,” but for real. He apes certain trappings of Sherlock Holmes (naming his cases with ostentatious names like The Case Of The Man With The Nonexistent Suitcases), but he’s also an emotional wreck – agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive and with social skills that are poor. But – and this is wonderful – over the course of the movie it becomes apparent that he is these things not because he is a genius, but because like everyone else on the planet, he is fucked up in his own way.

A “before he got real famous and annoying”-era Ben Stiller plays Zero’s Archie Goodwin analogue, Steve Arlo. Steve hates his job, but remains loyal to his boss even as he realizes he has to quit, and assists Zero in handling the case. It’s a good dramatic performance by Stiller, who can actually act when he wants to do that. (Which, because he is rich thanks to mugging like a jackass, is not often. But frankly, if I were rich thanks to mugging like a jackass, I would do the same thing.)

Arlo, on behalf of Zero, is contacted by a rich man named Stark (Ryan O’Neal at his sleazy best). Stark is being blackmailed, and wants the blackmailer found. That’s the mystery, and it absolutely ruins the movie if I tell you how Zero solves it or how it plays out – but I assure you, the payoff is excellent and the process utterly engaging.

But this isn’t just a mystery; it’s also a story about a guy who is fucked up trying to unfuck himself a little. Zero begins this process when, in the course of his investigation, he meets Gloria (the superlative Kim Dickens, who went on to play the magnificent Joanie Stubbs in Deadwood and nowadays occasionally shows up as the mother of Sawyer’s kid in Lost), an enigmatic EMT with obvious smarts. It spoils nothing to say that Gloria ends up being involved in the mystery to an extent (I mean, come on), but how she is involved and the ramifications of her interactions with Zero are fascinating to watch.

This is a difficult post to write because the process of watching this movie is half the fun; it’s just well-written on a scale that’s amazing, every performance is just about perfect and the direction by Jake Kasdan is competent enough to know not to get in the way. As I write this, I want to explain how the follow-the-money sequence brilliantly shows, rather than tells, how great a genius Darryl Zero is (and does so with a narrative voiceover, normally the bane of evocative filmmaking). But if I did, that would ruin it.

So you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Another film that got overlooked in theatres, and although most who have seen it sing its praises (and given the subject matter that is kind of a bad pun), it still hasn’t found the audience it rightly deserves on DVD as of yet. Right now it’s mostly a cult flick.

Saved is an excellent film about the troubling and fascinating power of faith, which takes very little for granted. As such, predictably, conservative Christian movie review sites hate it. The movie is a liberal one, but it is most certainly not an antireligious film; its conclusion lies firmly in the pro-faith side of the argument. I personally think this is part of the reason it fell under the radar – its target audience of tolerant faithful, while much larger than anybody gives it credit for, is not nearly so outspoken as the conservative religious and liberal non-religious camps.

It’s a movie with a number of nuanced performances, all uniformly excellent. Mandy Moore started off her penchant for playing hilarious psycho bitches with this movie. Her Hilary Faye is a terrific villain, but not unsympathetic – her nervousness and obvious lack of self-generated self-esteem turn what could have been a total cariacature into a compelling downward spiral. She might be bad, but she’s never one-note and she’s always understandable.

Jena “was Ellen Page before Ellen Page was Ellen Page” Malone plays the lead – a devout girl who becomes pregnant as a result of trying to “cure” her gay boyfriend’s homosexuality. She’s excellent – watching her faith shatter, then reform on her own terms is fascinating. When she hits bottom and stares at a church and just starts swearing, daring God to strike her down for blasphemy, it’s both sad and at the same time slightly funny. She’s not any good at blasphemy, so she just utters a few basic swear words like they’re the text of the Necronomicon, but Malone makes it work and then some. You can feel her devastation thoroughly.

The rest of the cast are uniformly terrific. Macaulay Culkin – of all people – contributes a gentle, understated and clever performance as Hilary Faye’s crippled brother. Patrick Fugit (who, I am informed by girls I have seen this movie with, has grown up all dreamy-like since Almost Famous) plays Malone’s love interest, a returning missionary who rides a moped. Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) contributes a brief turn as Hilary Faye’s lackey. Martin Donovan’s conflicted Father Ted is well done, and Mary-Louise Parker (whom I will watch in anything) is fantastic as Malone’s mother.

It’s a damned good movie, and a reclamation of religious faith for liberal values; the two are not incompatible and anyone who says different is simply wrong. And it’s funny. Especially when Mandy Moore runs Jesus over.

When 24 first debuted, everybody was making a huge deal about it being a story told in real time (well, except for Keifer Sutherland never having to go to the bathroom or anything like that), because it was, in fairness, something of a novelty.

Mostly because nobody had seen Nick of Time. It absolutely bombed in theatres and didn’t do much better on home video, which is a shame because it’s a really good little thriller which nowadays should be something that gets more notoriety, seeing as how it stars Johnny Depp at a point after Depp was a name but slightly before Depp became a bona fide leading man for action movies.

And it has Christopher Walken as the crazy-ass bad guy. This is good Walken, the sort of Walken role where in addition to being some variety of kooky there’s also weight to the role. All too frequently, Walken’s oft-stated tendency to take absolutely any script that comes his way in order for the paycheque comes to the fore: consider Balls of Fury, Domino, Click, or Man of the Year (and that’s just the lowlights of the last three years). However, every so often Walken gets to be in a decent movie where he can be heartwarmingly off-kilter (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can) or freaky and otherworldly (The Prophecy, Sleepy Hollow), or, at best, terrifyingly and criminally strange (True Romance, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead).

In Nick of Time, Walken gets to be a completely amoral mercenary who likes to tell stories. I am sure your appetite is now whetted.

The plot of Nick of Time is quite simple, if contrived: Walken, representative of a shadowy conspiracy, selects Depp at the train station when he sees Depp with his young daughter to kill the Governor of California (a totally awesome Marsha Mason). Walken and his partner (played with equal badassedness by Roma Maffia) take the girl hostage. If, in ninety minutes, the Governor isn’t dead (with the gun they give him), they kill his daughter.

It’s a ridiculous premise, of course, but director John Badham (who these days, after having directed classics like Saturday Night Fever and WarGames, is apparently just directing episodes of second-tier television programs, sad to say) plays it absolutely straight and never lets the viewer lose suspension of disbelief – making sure that clocks are near-constantly in frame to remind the audience that time is ticking away (and the fact that the movie is in real time just reinforces the tension), regularly framing the action through video cameras (held by operatives of the shadowy conspiracy, who plan to use the tape of Depp running around looking frantic and nervous as proof that he was clearly a crazed assassin), and using the narrow halls of the hotel where practically the entire film takes place as befits the paranoid feeling of the film.

The dialogue between Depp and Walken crackles; Depp plays desperate straight man to Walken’s crazy rant master. And although the plot is ludicrous, the payoff at the end is tight with not an ounce of narrative flab. Plus, you get to cheer for Charles S. Dutton, and who wouldn’t want to cheer for Roc?

At one point, a long time ago, Dabney Coleman was the king shit.

You have to understand that at this time, Dabney Coleman was the definition of irascible authority figure. If you needed a tough bastard who deep down (often very very deep down) had a heart of gold, Dabney Coleman was your first and only choice. (Well, unless Howard Hesseman was available, but let’s face it, Howard Hesseman carries with him a streak of anti-authoritarianism that sometimes fails to work in establishment roles.)

But sometimes, you gotta stretch a bit.

Cloak and Dagger is perhaps one of the biggest stretches of all time in another sense, seeing as how it is loosely – very, very loosely – themed around the Atari arcade game of the same name. You might be thinking that making a movie after a popular game is no big deal, what with this being the era of Doom and Resident Evil and presumably other video game movies, possibly some of which don’t even have zombies in them. However, again, I feel the need to stress that this was an Atari video game, and it’s not like they made a movie out of Asteroids or Donkey Kong.

Wait, they made Super Mario Brothers, and that’s kind of like a Donkey Kong movie. I retract my previous statement.

Regardless. Considering that the Cloak and Dagger videogame did not, as such, have a plot, the screenwriters basically went apeshit and put the actual video game in the movie as a plot element, using it to smuggle important spy document sorts of things. Henry Thomas (Elliot in E.T.) stars as the kid hero who daydreams of being a super-spy, adventuring alongside his hero, super-spy (and star of both roleplaying game and video game) Jack Flack. And of course, his ludicrous adventures turn awry when he actually stumbles upon a real spy conspiracy – and of course nobody believes him.

And Coleman – Coleman plays a double role, and it’s a brilliant turn – as both the boy’s father and as his fantasy of Jack Flack. The two roles play off each other perfectly, the sober responsibility of the father contrasting in just about every way with Ideal Boyhood Companion (and pretty much insane) Flack; Coleman switches roles easily and smoothly, never letting Flack and Dad coincide, even for a moment – which works out perfectly when Flack turns out to be, unsurprisingly, pretty much useless for anything serious and Dad has to go full-on enraged papa bear to save his son from the actual real terrorists.

It’s an excellent family movie, and one of the few good family-appropriate thrillers extant period. (It’s not exactly a genre that gets a lot of play, after all.) It’s exciting on its own merits, frequently a little bit scary (and I am a firm believer that there is nothing wrong with family movies being a bit scary). And it has Dabney Coleman in it. What more could you ask?

Sherlock Holmes does not get enough movie love, these days.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point Sherlock Holmes, one of the most fantastically cinematic characters there is, got relegated to television. The lengthy Jeremy Brett series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes likely had something to do with it, simply because it was such a good television show and so perfectly realized that it almost seemed to make further adaptations of the classic Holmes stories pointless. (After all, the series managed to neatly adapt practically all of the original Holmes stories.)

There’s also the continuing fear of making new Holmes stories, not least because the original Sherlock Holmes stories are so elegantly written; the mystery genre is, to this day, largely defined by the rules set out by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even if he never actually intended to create rules for mystery writing in the first place. And if you’re going to write a mystery story, it becomes more intimidating to write one using Sherlock Holmes, because his fanbase, to this day, remains quite enthusiastic – and judgemental.

Even so, that’s no excuse. More Holmes movies are needed. But, in the meantime, there are two excellent and largely underrated flicks for Holmes fans to enjoy, both evading the “but I can’t imitate Conan Doyle” trap by twisting the concept as they saw fit to create a new type of story.

Without A Clue goes for a comedic take on the Holmes saga, with a very simple premise: Watson is the actual genius. The film actually mirrors a lot of real-life publisher’s intrigue surrounding Holmes: Conan Doyle based the Sherlock Holmes character on a police physician (Dr. Joseph Bell – there’s actually a very good BBC mystery series called Murder Rooms about Bell solving mysteries, with Conan Doyle in the Watson role). Further, Conan Doyle, like Watson in this movie, grew heartily sick of Sherlock Holmes and tried to get rid of him.Of course, Conan Doyle just tried to kill him off in a story. Watson (played by Ben Kingsley, who is awesome in just about everything he has ever been in) has a more difficult trick: due to originally wanting to solve the mysteries incognito (which he’s gotten past, not least because he’s realized how lucrative the private detecting business can be), he hired a drunken stage actor named Reginald Kincaid (Michael Caine, who is, as always, Michael fucking Caine) to play the Holmes role. Finally, Watson loses his temper and fires Kincaid, but – whoops – nobody wants to read about “John Watson – the Crime Doctor!” So he reluctantly rehires Kincaid for one last go-around, and of course this turns into a fantastic adventure.

It’s hilarious and exciting both, in equal measures (the final action sequence, in a burning theatre, is really fantastic considering it’s a couple of British guys in their 50s doing all the stunt work), and although the film suffers part way through for having Kingsley offscreen for an extended period (and it’s a shame, because when Caine and Kingsley are tossing lines at one another like exploding popcorn, it’s almost unparalleled great fun), when he storms back triumphantly it’s just all the better. And Caine is of course himself in full fetter, playing the type of role he plays best – a working-class lad trying to pretend he’s classier than he is. As a bonus, Jeffrey Jones plays Lestrade, and Jeffrey Jones is hilarious in everything.

Young Sherlock Holmes goes a wholly different way, one that was somewhat controversial among Holmes fans – it’s a swashbuckling adventure flick rather than a pure mystery, and Holmes’ detective skills, while evident, aren’t nearly so important to the story as his ability with a rapier. Answering the never-asked-but-why-not question of “what if Holmes and Watson met when they were in school” with “well, clearly they would investigate a murderous cult,” the film is nowadays frequently reduced to being the answer to a trivia question. (“What film had the first totally computer-generated character?”)

It deserves better. Young Sherlock Holmes is burdened unfairly in a number of ways, not least being the fact that the bad guys are a cult (one of those things that never really seems to click with audiences in movies). Alan Cox as Young Watson is, perhaps, somewhat overwhelmed by the role. And maybe a little more detectoring would have been in order, considering it’s a Sherlock Holmes movie in title if nothing else. (Admittedly, the film’s ending makes it clear that Holmes’ experiences over the course of the story teach him to value deductive logic and discipline above all else, so it’s not incorrectly used – but it still feels a bit incongruous.)

But its strengths greatly outweigh the minuses. The action sequences are excellent, the plot well-thought-out (it was written by Chris Columbus, of all people). The villains are excellent and genuinely freakish when they need to be, and the hallucinogenic sequences are scary in all the right ways. The comedic bits don’t detract from the story in the slightest (and in a movie like this one, where the desire to break the fourth wall is almost palpable, that’s a great thing). Best of all, the central romantic relationship between Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes and Sophie Ward as Elizabeth is excellent; both young actors are very talented and play their roles near-perfectly.

Both films are great, but they can’t give us what we truly crave, which is more original Holmes flicks in the classic mold. But, until such time as somebody makes a new one, they do quite nicely.