The Black Cauldron (1985)

"Arise my messengers of death! Our time has... ARRIVED."

Star Rating: ***
"The Black Cauldron" doesn’t really feel like a Disney movie. Its animation, and with a darker story than most Disney features, gives it the feel of Ralph Bakshi’s animated "The Lord of the Rings" film. "The Black Cauldron" is a work of high fantasy, loosely based off of "The Chronicles of Prydain" series by Lloyd Alexander. It is not exactly a typical Disney fairytale, but it is certainly fantasy.

It’s also very flawed. There are numerous holes in the plot with regards to missing data. Something might happen and you find yourself saying, “Wait, that didn’t make sense…”

"The Black Cauldron", directed by Richard Rich and Ted Berman, is set in the kingdom of Prydain, and centers on the existence of a legendary black cauldron with unlimited magical ability. We have a nice prologue giving us the information we need narrated by John Huston, who also provided the voice for Gandalf in the animated versions of "The Hobbit" and "The Return of the King". The cauldron is sought out by the evil Horned King (voiced by John Hurt), who would use its powers to create an army of dead soldiers. These "deathless warriors" are unstoppable because they are a. dead, and b. alive due to a magic spell. Sending forth his invincible army, the Horned King would conquer and take over Prydain.

It couldn’t be clearer that this creature, (I’m not quite sure what he is), is intended to be a horrible enemy just by the way he is drawn. He is a skeleton beneath a thick robe with two large antler-like horns coming out of his head. The sight of this creature is rather frightening. Perhaps a little too frightening considering this movie is supposedly intended for children.

The Horned King is one of the most magnetic of the Disney villains, and admittedly one of my personal favorites. In 20 years, if the rest of the film is forgotten, I hope that "The Black Cauldron" is remembered solely for the Horned King. He’s a creepy looking goon, and actor John Hurt provides an aptly creepy voice. The Horned King ranks up there with Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), who gave me the worst nightmares of my life when I saw her eyes yellow malevolent eyes gleaming from the fireplace in the Princess Aurora’s bedchamber. There's even a frightening scene in "The Black Cauldron" involving the Horned King's eyes. In fact, the Horned King and Maleficent look somewhat alike in how they dress, where they live, and certainly in their malevolent intentions. It's a wonder that the two close friends or even lovers in some video game or picture book.

Hen Wen is an oracular pig who can create visions, and can show the location of the black cauldron. Therefore, if caught by the Horned King, everyone would kind of be in trouble. Hen Wen was kept hidden from the Horned King by the sorcerer Dalben. When Hen Wen senses that the Horned King is looking for her, Dalben sends her away with the pig keeper Taran. Taran is the protagonist of the story, who longs to be a warrior rather than just an assistant pig keeper. When Hen Wen is put in his charge, Taran is overcome with excitement to rush off and be a hero. He promises he won’t let Dalben down. As Taran fantasizes about being a renowned hero, Hen Wen wonders off, and is captured by the Horned King’s agents almost immediately. Oops.

Taran attempts to recover Hen Wen, and gets thrown into the Horned King’s dungeon. While imprisoned meets Eilonwy, who claims she’s a princess but is called a scullery maid by the Horned King in a later scene, so I’m not sure what she really is. This is another example of the flawed storytelling. Taran and Eilonwy go exploring the dungeons, and meet the minstrel Fflewddur Flam, who is also a prisoner of the Horned King. Together they escape from the Horned King’s castle, as they are pursued by huntsmen and ferocious dogs. Along the way, they meet a little Muppet like creature called Gurgi, who’s just kind of a troublemaker on the look out for food. He joins the team, and they all go gallivanting off to find the black cauldron.

"The Black Cauldron" is an enjoyable film, if not a particularly well made one. The Horned King stole the movie, but the cuteness of the pig, and the fantastical and adventurous aspects of the story also make it an interesting experience. It’s a good story, it just felt rushed. If the plot were laid out more carefully it probably would have been better.

The characters are fun, too. They aren’t as developed as they might be though. Knowing who Eilonwy is, and whether she is a princess or a scullery maid would have been nice. Knowing a bit more about Taran’s background also might have been nice, because we never know how he wound up an assistant pig keeper at Dalben’s house.
The final battle is also worth mentioning, though not in detail so as to avoid spoilers. This again is mostly attributed to the presence of the Horned King, and how frightening he can look. After the fight all is resolved, but the resolution also feels rushed and doesn’t really make much sense because there is so much data missing.

I’m sure the books made a lot more sense. "The Black Cauldron" is based on two of Alexander’s "Chronicles of Prydain" series: "The Book of Three" and "The Black Cauldron". When I heard this, it made sense why the plot didn’t seem well balanced. When two stories, especially in the high fantasy genre, are blended together at high speed in order to be condensed into an 80 minute movie, the result is usually less than smooth. Another example of this is the motion picture "The Last Airbender", based on the popular TV series which is incidentally also a work of high fantasy.

"The Black Cauldron" isn’t a great Disney film, but it has such a memorable villain, and enough other things going for it, that it would be a shame if it was forgotten as time goes by. It’s not perfect, but it is entertaining. At least the movie has that in its favor.

Elephant (2003)

Therapy just wouldn't cut it...

Star Rating: **
Gus Van Sant’s "Elephant" is much like the film’s own background shots—blurry, unfocused and confusing. This film has nothing nice to say and takes far too long to say it. At the end of the movie, I asked myself what really happened here. I came up with one answer: nothing I wanted to see.

The lack of anything happening in the first half of the film strongly implies that something will happen in the second. But when it does, you wish the movie would go back to being boring and safe. You can’t have nightmares from something that’s boring and safe.

The story is loosely based on the notorious 1999 Columbine High School Massacre. Fine. If the goal of this movie is to be completely horrible and rig us with bullet after bullet of how shitty life really is, it accomplishes this within moments.

"Elephant" is told in a nonlinear order, using various techniques including faded backgrounds and scenes shot from different angels to imply that we’re seeing the same scene but from someone else’s perspective. The big picture of the movie is that two teenaged boys go on a massive shooting spree at a fictional high school in Portland, Oregon. The problem here is that the actual shootings take place in the last twenty minutes of the movie. The first hour is just scene after scene after scene of high school kid scenarios that just takes us off the track of what this movie is really about because we think the story will be about these kids and their problems.

We have a). the boy who has trouble connecting with his father. B). The chatty school girly girl group. C). The couple of cutesy lovers. D). A dude who walks around and takes pictures of stuff. E). a girl who gets picked on for wearing the wrong clothes to gym and has a job she probably hates. If I’m boring you with seemingly superfluous character descriptions then I’m effectively describing the structure of this film.

This movie really emphasizes that the shooting takes place on a normal school day. It accomplishes this very effectively, by showing us all of those everyday school scenes. It made the outcome even more tragic. I liked the characters and their situations. Those girls made me laugh a little. I was intrigued by that artsy photographer. My heart went out to the girl who was getting picked on for wearing the wrong clothes to gym. All these characters we meet that we begin to form attachments to really have no purpose accept to get killed at the end. And the depressing, mind eating, sob provoking ending is the best part. And when I say best I mean—

I’m not denying Gus Van Sant’s talent, he can tell a good story. But this project was so nasty to start with and all he really accomplishes is making it look worse. I have to wonder, was that really his plan? How can you take a subject as gruesome as kids murdering each other and adults too, and make it entertaining? It doesn’t work here at all. It’s almost shameless what Van Sant puts on screen here.

The film does delve into the lives of the killers themselves. At first, it’s rather interesting. They’re two boys who get teased a lot. Before they go around shooting everyone, they are making out in the shower. Then in the last five minutes of the film, one guns the other down. This kills the idea of a classical romance between the killers, ala "Bonnie & Clyde", and instead makes… no sense, poetic or otherwise.

"Elephant" won the Palme d’Or (Prize for Best Picture) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. The nice thing about the Cannes Film Festival is that it focuses on the smaller, less well known indie films from around the world. Cannes gives films like these a chance to shine and maybe become classics. After all, some of the best films of all time started out small. Some of the great classics of today, i.e. "Taxi Driver", "Apocalypse Now" and "Pulp Fiction" were all Palme d’Or winners. However, every so often there is a serious miscarriage of justice. The fact that two teenaged guys get away with a massive killing spree and that someone won a prize for showing it on screen would be some of them.

Repulsion (1965)

This is what makes "Repulsion" work

Star Rating: ***½
"Repulsion" is one of those movies that when you see it, you just don’t know what to do with it. I will say this for the film—it’s creepy. There is a scene where we see a family photograph taken sometime during the childhood of the main character. This photograph is one of the most profoundly creepy things I’ve ever seen in a movie. The camera zooms into the look of fear and loathing on a little girl’s face, directed at a man sitting near her. Was it here, with this man, that her subtle yet undoubtedly real hatred of men originated?

That seems to be what the film drives at—that this young, attractive woman is completely repulsed by men. It’s subtle, it’s addressed using a few different techniques, and that seems to be the take home message when the film is over. This young, attractive woman is a Belgian manicurist named Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), who is living in a hotel in England with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). Carol seems shy from the first. She dislikes her sister’s boyfriend, and is thoroughly uninterested in Colin (John Fraser), a young man who is smitten with her.

When Helen and her boyfriend go on holiday to Italy, Carol is left alone in the apartment. From there on out, she is slowly eaten alive by her own paranoia, until she is a complete mess. She has horrible hallucinations of the walls of the apartment cracking, of hands breaking out of the wall and attacking her, and of men appearing out of no where and raping her. To make matters worse, when she is trying to sleep she is constantly disturbed by the sounds of a couple making love in a nearby apartment. None of this is pleasant to watch, and was even rather frustrating while trying to see all this was going.

Carol works at a beauty salon. In one scene, she is present while a client is saying how men only want one thing from a woman. A few scenes earlier, Carol comforts a distraught friend of hers, whose boyfriend has been a “pig” to her. The men around Carol, with the possible exception of Colin, seem to just want her to satisfy their own sexual hunger. Some of Carol’s most horrific hallucinations are of her being raped. Eventually we are presented with the Ledoux family picture, with Helen and Carol as young girls. Helen is smiling away, while Carol looks uncomfortably at a man sitting near her.

What really makes "Repulsion" so unsettling and even frightening isn’t the hallucinations, or dream sequences, or distressing situations that Carol ends up in. It’s the implication that something happened to Carol—something horrible happened to her as a child. Something that made her fear men the way she seems to. And what was it that happened, anyway? This is a rhetorical question. I don’t want an answer. The implication is disturbing enough.

As with most psychological thrillers, the pacing in "Repulsion" is very slow. This is because the story has to be conveyed effectively, and the audience has to be freaked out. The film feels tedious as it unfolds, but all is forgiven when the end comes. The stretches of tedium are shattered when Carol’s hallucinations come on, often very suddenly. And they usually die off as suddenly as they come on.
With "Repulsion", director Roman Polanski, not well known in English-speaking cinemas by the mid 1960s, makes a grand entrance in English language cinema. His film is amongst the classic psychological thrillers, and is very nearly an erotic thriller as well. In this disturbing little world "Repulsion" encompasses, there is no love. There is only sex in the most illicit sense of the word.

Polanski himself was convicted of the statutory rape of a 13-yr-old girl in 1977, and fled the United States to Europe to avoid arrest. It’s always interesting when a film foreshadows its director’s life. All the hints provided to the viewer that Carol was sexually abused as a child, provided by a future child molester. In a strange way, Polanski and Carol have more or less the same problem—they’re both cornered. If Polanski returns to the United States, he will be arrested for statutory rape. When Carol recovers from her fragile mental state, she will either be put in a hospital for the criminally insane, or arrested for two homicides. Both people are fugitives.

Biographical information obtained from IMDB.com

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

Anamaria Marinca in Christian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" (2007)--Winner of the 2007 Palmd'Or (Best Picture Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.)

Star Rating: ***½
From the first minute of this film alone, we know that something is terribly wrong. From the title of the film, (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), as well as snippets of dialogue between the players, it is heavily implied that one of our main characters, a college student named Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), is pregnant. She and her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) are trying to arrange something with the utmost secrecy, supposedly an abortion. However the words “pregnancy” and “abortion” are not used till about 40 minutes into the film. The implications the film produces create a flawless web of suspense that captivates the audience’s attention. After that, the screenplay and the performances are what carry the film to its finish.

"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", is Romanian film, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. It is set in an unspecified Romanian village in March, 1987, at a time when communist policies forbade abortions. Otilia and Gabita check into a hotel room, and hire Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), who performs an abortion on Gabita. Bebe turns out to be a hard, unfair, and cold businessman with no conscious. He does oblige with the abortion—at the price of sleeping with the reluctant girls.

From start to finish, the film has an incredibly gloomy feel to it—from its depressing subject matter to its cold wintry landscapes, darkly lit rooms and its absence of a film score. These elements reminded me of the Coen Brothers’ "No Country for Old Men", another 2007 release that increased its suspense by expelling the use of music throughout the picture. Also like "No Country", "4 Months" unfolds at a very deliberate pace, ensuring that it conveys its grim contents perfectly.

The direction and acting for 4 Months are both very impressive. There are many heavily dialogued scenes, but no over the shoulder camera shots are used. The dialogue is all filmed in either a medium close up or profile shot on the speaker’s face, or in wide angle shots of the multiple characters in their conversations. The actors all give good performances, and make their situations quite believable, especially considering the incredibly long takes.

Most impressive was Anamaria Marinca, who plays Otilia. Otilia is more or less the one with the brains. She has to take the reigns in dealing with the business aspect of abortion because Gabita acts like a dishonest child, and you see how playing caretaker wears Otilia out emotionally.

By comparison, Laura Vasiliu gives a great performance as a foolish, dishonest, and suffering young woman. These are both hard roles to play, and they are essential to the plot. The troubling aspects of the story begin and end with Otilia and Gabita. If these roles hadn’t been played well, the whole film would have fallen apart.

"4 Months" rubs off as a statement about dishonesty, but also loyalty. Otilia sticks by Gabita, even though she becomes fed up with her dishonesty and carelessness. After such a distressing narrative, there comes the question “how does this end?” Without giving away any details, the ending doesn’t take the easy way out—it does the characters and the story more justice than any other ending would have.

This is a tough sit. The performances are virtually flawless, if the characters certainly aren’t. The gloom is so well done that it is almost painful to watch. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", creates its world and sucks us into that world for two hours, leaving us feeling somewhat depressed, but nonetheless impressed with its skill.

True Grit (2010)

"The Dude", a man with true grit? Depends on who you ask.

Star Rating: ***½
It’s been eighteen years since "Unforgiven" (1992), which was considered by many to be the swansong of the classic western genre. Westerns seem to have rolled out of Hollywood with the tumbleweeds. Joel and Ethan Coen are masters of their craft, and have perfected thrillers, ("Blood Simple", "Fargo"), comedies, ("Raising Arizona", "The Big Lebowski"), and dramas, ("No Country for Old Men", "A Serious Man"). Being such masters, it was only a matter of time till they tried executing a western.

The Coens did right in making their western by adapting it from a novel, rather than using the elements of the common western to invent a potentially recycled plotline. "True Grit" has already been made for the screen in 1969 with John Wayne as the hero. However, the Coens’ take on the story isn’t necessarily a remake. It’s closer to the source material, Charles Portis’s novel, than to the 1969 version.

The main plot is rather easy to put on paper. 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires drunken, hardened Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Brides), a man with “true grit”, to help her find Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. They are joined by Texas Ranger Le Bouf (Matt Damon). Together they go off on a set of adventures to find Cheney. This really feels like a Coen bros film. It runs on a rather simple story with quirky characters, punchy dialogue, sudden and overwhelming spouts of violence, and a great closing line to accompany a nonspecific almost non-ending.

A revenge odyssey mixed with suspense, character development and bittersweet scenarios really drives a good western. During one fight scene, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to "Fargo" (1996), my personal favorite of the Coens films, in which one twitchy hood unsuccessfully attempts to talk his way out of a tight spot with a policeman, creating a suspenseful moment leading up to the violent murder of the policeman. That scene would look great in a western. The fight scene I referred to takes place after a long conversational interlude, when Cogburn whips out his gun and shoots someone in the head. It was sudden, brutal, messy, and made me exclaim to myself, “Wow, wow daddy,” just like the hood in "Fargo".

I really think that Jeff Bridges is the perfect man to play a guy like Rooster Cogburn. He has the gruff exterior and rough demeanor for the job. Its twelve years since Bridges starred in the Coens’ cult masterpiece "The Big Lebowski" (1998), in which he played a lazed slacker. Here, as you can imagine, he’s the complete opposite. He’s riding around on horses, guns in both fists, firing at charging opponents. Nobody can spin or fire a gun quite like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, but I was in all of "True Grit"’s fight scenes, rooting for Cogburn to shoot his way on top. Back in ’69, John Wayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn. If history repeats itself, Bridges will win an Oscar for his “gritty” performance, a mere year after he won Best Actor for "Crazy Heart" (2009).

Also worth noting is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. She plays Mattie and she sure does a fine job. Even though she’s serious in the movie, I could feel that she was having a lot of fun with her character. Compared with Kim Darby, who played Mattie in 1969, Steinfeld’s Mattie is a lot stronger willed. Darby’s interpretation, though tough and gritty, felt more intimidated and vulnerable. Not to say that Steinfeld is a pillar of strength and Darby is a wimp; they both demonstrate moments of grit and fear. Who wouldn’t in a story like this? It’s just that one side is more visible in one actress than the other.

I was pleased to see that the Matt Damon character, who leads us to believe he’s a real jerk in the beginning, proves his mettle in helping the quest. Part of the simplicity of this story lies in that the good guys are actually good and the bad guys are actually bad, at least poetically speaking. There’s really no moral ambiguity here. "True Grit" is pretty easy to mark on a graph, with one axis being good, the other being bad, and no ugly to speak of.

I had such faith that the Coen brothers would do great work, and you know what? I was right. Nothing gets them down, nothing holds them back—they create because that is what they were put on this earth to do. I’m waiting for them attempt a fairy tale or a Sci-Fi epic, and westerns? They can do it, no problem. They create an old west where “the Rooster abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.”

Memento (2000)

Guy Pearce holding one of his "mementos"

Star Rating: ***½
"Memento"—a Latin word meaning “remember”. "Memento" follows the adventures of Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man with short term memory-loss trying to find his wife’s killer, but is hindered by his condition. He therefore had to take photographs and write himself notes and tattoo really important information on his body.

These are the obvious “mementos” in the film, but there are additional mementos too. "Memento" is that it is based on a story called "Memento Mori", written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, a title which translates as “remember you will die.” From the start of the movie, we remember that somebody dies. In the beginning this isn’t such a bad thing, but in the end we wonder was it really poetic justice, and how many more people will die?

Leonard Shelby is an ex-insurance investigator who is trying to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. After he finished with his wife, he cracked Leonard’s head against a mirror, giving him Anterograde amnesia, or short term memory loss. This condition prevents Leonard from forming new memories—he can remember who he is and every that happened before “the incident”. “I have this condition,” he explains to the characters he meets, usually greeted by a “you told me already.”

Nevertheless, Leonard remains dedicated to finding and murdering the man who killed his wife and took his memory away. To remember things, Leonard takes photographs of people and places and he even tattoos information on his body. He is aided by a bartender named Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss) and a friendly guy named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano).

The plot is told in reverse chronological order. In between the chapters told backwards there is another story told in black and white, involving in a hotel room Leonard talking to some unknown person over the phone about Sammy Jankis, a man with short term memory loss who Leonard frequently compares himself to, that advances in chronological order. Sound confusing? It is, and it’s supposed to be.

Sammy is a very crucial subplot of Memento. During the days of Leonard’s career as an insurance investigator, he investigated the claim that Sammy had gotten Anetrograde amnesia due to an injury he received in a car accident and should be covered for physical disability. When Leonard is diagnosed with the same problem, he tattoos "Remember Sammy Jankis" on his hand. “Sammy Jankis had the same problem,” he reflects, “but he really had no system. He’d write himself a ridiculous amount of notes, but he’d get them all mixed up.”

By his use of a nonlinear plotline, Nolan effectively puts us inside Leonard’s mind and displays the intense confusion inside his head as he reads his memos and tattoos and tries to remember what he’s been doing and what he’s going to do. We encounter characters who we think are good, then a few chapters forward (or backwards) we discover that maybe they weren’t so good. Leonard doesn’t remember all this because of his condition, and we don’t remember because—well, we haven’t seen it yet.

Warning: Here be Spoilers:

Leonard is a classic Noir antagonist. He is, in a word, ambiguous. Nolan’s script makes the audience sympathize with him and want the best for him. Yet underneath that smiling exterior lurks some kind of homicidal monster. Personally the idea that he kills people to make himself happy, that he kills the man who gave him so much help just to give meaning to his life, makes me hate this man. Let’s see, smiling and likable, yet complicated and destructive. Could this be the new Norman Bates?

Spoilers Be Gone

Nolan’s second film after the dramatic Neo-Noir "Following" (1998), which was a bleak but nevertheless impressive directorial debut for Nolan, "Memento" reflects the ethic of a born filmmaker and storyteller. Much like Quentin Tarantino ("Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction"), Nolan has a gift for presenting an interesting plotline and giving it to life by cutting it up and serving it out of order.

The charisma and crisp quality that Nolan brings to the screen is most refreshing indeed. I wrote in my review for "Following" that the title as well as the quality of the film seems to suggest that more good films will follow from Christopher Nolan. That was just circumstantial evidence, but "Memento" proves that point. There is also one scene in the movie when Leonard passes a comic book store where the Batman logo in the window. Perhaps "Memento" can forget the past, but can Nolan’s movies tell the future?

Following (1998)

1998 never looked so much like 1949

Star Rating: **½
"Following" is not a big budget picture and must have been very cheaply shot, and has the feel of a homemade movie, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That gives it a touch of character. It is still a decent movie. It is very intriguing on two levels. 1. Because of its insight into human nature, i.e. curiosity and lust; and 2. Because it wraps the humanity of the story into the bitter cocoon of a traditional Film Noir held together in the form of a nonlinear narrative. This is not a happy story and it does not end on a happy note. To sum up, this film is good, but only on a really morbid level. To me the bad points outweigh the good ones this time.

“The following is my explanation of what happened,” a young unnamed man (Jeremy Theobald) begins, and he proceeds to tell his story to a police officer (John Nolan), a story of how he started following random people just for the heck of it. “You followed women?” asks the policeman. “No, I followed anyone,” the man insists. “I want to be a writer and I wanted material for my characters.” He adds, “When you see somebody’s behavior and it raises 100,000 questions. I wanted to ask those questions and find out what the answers were. The most important rule was never follow the same person twice. That was the rule I broke first.” Just take into account that this is a condensation of a fairly long monologue.

This speech puts a rather Hitchcockian spin on a modern city street creeper. It’s human curiosity that drives our young man forward into his adventures, for better or for worse. The trick is to not let the person see that you’re following them. That is the second rule that our hero breaks and it ends him up in some trouble.

He makes the acquaintance of Cobb (Alex Haw), a thief whom he had been shadowing periodically. Cobb shows him how to properly rob houses and soon the young, fascinated by this thrilling lifestyle, is hooked on it too. He meets a blonde woman (Lucy Russell), who also remains unnamed throughout the picture, in a bar. He offers to buy her a drink. She tells him he can, but that he cannot sleep with her. Over the next few sequences (mixed out of chronological order) the two fall in love, or at least in lust.

They are in love and kissing within twenty-five minutes, but this is a fairly short picture so I’ll let that slide this time. There is a certain chemical crackle between the two I will admit. It starts out happy, but is then extinguished by the series of plot twists that exist in any Film Noir. The slick thing about Following is that the twists are showed to us ahead of time, but since we haven’t seen the ending, we don’t know what it means.

In between the man-blonde love scenes are the man-Cobb burglary scenes. Cobb is a fairly mysterious individual. We’re never quite sure whether he’s a “good guy” or “bad guy” till the end. He seems to alternate sides. I personally could smell trouble in his appearance, somehow something about him spells “bad guy.” Could it have been the fact that he robs houses for a living? I wonder.

"Following", being the first from acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan, foreshadows that Nolan’s “following” pictures will be clever, dark, profound and occasionally disturbing, but above all, good and hopefully better. Not that Following isn’t good, I just hope to see better from this director.

Can I define better? Well, for one thing a little longer. Nolan, whose script impressed me more than anything else, writes lines that give a great deal of insight into his characters. This movie is very short, and while it has plenty of personality, it could have gone on longer and said a little more.

For another thing, I want something more uplifting. The ending of this film left me with a fairly depressed feeling. Perhaps this was due to the movie’s lack of justice—which I think is one of its central statements. Occasionally in the movies, you take a movie that is like black coffee—utterly bitter and no redemptive qualities. Add a little sugar and it’s a little better, but not much. This is how "Following" affected me.

Nolan has talent, and can present and interesting story with interesting characters in a short time span. But I’m pretty sure that he can do better. I’m sure greater films will “follow”. (Second time I’ve used this pun, see above).