Watching the Best Picture WInners

Why John Brascia is the secret hero of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."

Just finished the annual family viewing of "White Christmas." So good. And the movie's secret weapon? John Brascia.

Who's that? This guy dancing with Vera-Ellen:

Here's my theory: John Brascia's role in this movie makes no sense at all. Danny Kaye is Vera-Ellen's love interest in the movie. He should be, by the usual logic of Hollywood storytelling, her duet partner in all her big dances. Indeed, Kaye and Vera-Ellen have a lovely dance early in the movie:

After that, though, it's Brascia — who utters no lines in the movie (see the comments below) — who is the main dance partner. It's aided by the show-within-a-show conceit of the movie: They're practicing for an upcoming musical, you see. But again, this doesn't make a whole lotta sense...

...unless you consider this possibility: Brascia, and not Kaye, was the only dancer on set who could keep up with Vera-Ellen.

Yes, Kaye was enormously gifted as a dancer. But he was already in his early 40s when "White Christmas" was made. Brascia is a good 21 years younger. And Vera-Ellen is a hell of a dancer.

Watch this. Watch Brascia's feet, especially.

Love me some Danny Kaye. But he's not keeping up with Vera-Ellen there. John Brascia is.

It's OK! That's not a knock on Kaye. Vera-Ellen's vocals were reputedly dubbed by Rosemary Clooney. This movie knew what its performers strengths and weaknesses were and adjusted accordingly. More than 60 years later, it's still a hell of a watch. And John Brascia, whose name I bet you didn't know, is one big reason why.

Filmstruck Queue: "Le Samourai"

Three thoughts about "Le Samourai" just as soon as I create a fantastic alibi:

1. I'd never heard of this movie until today, when I saw it as a Filmstruck offering. When I saw the ingredients — a sharp-dressed French assassin living by the samurai code — I was helpless. Play! And it's rare that I say this: This movie was everything I could've hoped it would be. Smart. Funny. Stylish. Sexy. With a fantastically tragic ending that, yeah, you kind of see coming, but they sell the hell out of it. I hadn't heard of this movie 12 hours ago. I think it's one of my favorite movies ever, now.

2. Just non-stop with the beautiful people. I mean...

Guys, I'm straight, but even I know Alain Delon circa 1967 is about as pretty as it gets.

I mean....

I'm blinded by all the beauty.

I know I know. Movies have beautiful people. What can I say? Even the extras were knockouts in this flick.

3. There's a scene when our protagonist takes his stolen car to a mechanic to make "legit" on the streets. I thought to myself: "Seems like Brian Cranston's character in 'Drive.'"

Wikipedia informs me that Walter Hill's 1978 thriller "The Driver" was "heavily influenced" by "Le Samourai." And, of course, "The Driver" was a huge influence on Ryan Gosling's "Drive."

Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun, kids.

Bonus note: Other movies that owe a debt include John Woo's "The Killer" and (of course) Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" featuring Forest Whitaker as the Japanese-influenced hitman. Again: Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun.

Filmstruck Queue: "Hard Eight" by Paul Thomas Anderson

Three thoughts about "Hard Eight" just as soon as I have a quickie wedding in Reno....

1. This is P.T. Anderson's first feature — he'd go on to really break through in the mainstream with his next, "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia" after that — and it's a little different from the sprawling ensemble-driven pieces that made his name. This movie focuses mostly on a single character, Philip Baker Hall's Sydney, and his relationship with a young, dumb ne'er do well played by John C. Reilly. It's a great role for Hall: Sydney is a cipher until the movie's final moments, when the reasons for his paternal care of Reilly become suddenly clear in a burst of violence. And the circles under Hall's eyes? Man, they deserved an Oscar acting nomination on their own.

2. There's a cameo here, all of two or three minutes, by Philip Seymour Hoffman before he was Philip Seymour Hoffman.  One hand, there's no reason to expect future stardom here: Hoffman's got long, stringy hair and a chubby body, and not all of that is character development. But the manic energy — tinged, ultimately with regret — that Hoffman brings to this part of a redneck hotshot at the craps table proves the old adage about there being no small parts.

3. I'm now convinced that every movie with John C. Reilly should feature a short monologue about his martial arts skills. Between his part in this movie and "Boogie Nights," it's kind of easy to see why Reilly — who once seemed to rival Hoffman as one of his generation's leading dramatic film character actors — took a left turn into comedy.

Bonus: Now we know why Samuel L. Jackson shaves his head these days. Oof, that hairline.

Filmstruck Queue: "Paths of Glory," directed by Stanley Kubrick

Three thoughts about "Paths of Glory" just as soon as I'm shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy:

1. This in one of Stanley Kubrick's early movies, and you can draw a straight line from this picture to "Full Metal Jacket" in its anti-war themes. More than that, this is an anti-authoritarian movie: A picture about how the elites sacrifice the lives of real people, how they dance in their palaces and feast on sumptuous foods while ordinary footsoldiers are quite literally forced to give their lives for the errors of those elites. There is no happy ending here, only the relentless logic of an awful story that ends up exactly where it must once the wheels are set in motion.

2. Kirk Douglas is one of he best movie stars we've ever had. He's beautiful — check him out shirtless in his opening scene, all 1950s Charles Atlas virility — and he's fierce. When he denounces a commanding general in the climactic scene — "And you can go to hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!" — his hair flies askew and his eyes are filled with rage, and you want to stand up and cheer. They truly don't make them like this any more. 

3. All these French soldiers sound like they're from Queens. 

Bonus thought: If you like old or independent movies, the new Filmstruck service— which combines the forces of Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection — is the bomb. Totally worth it.

Netflix Queue*: "The Conversation," starring Gene Hackman

Three thoughts about "The Conversation" just as soon as I rip my apartment apart in a fruitless search for the wiretap....

1: Francis Ford Coppola sandwiched this movie between "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part II." That's an astonishing run of movie artistry. And it's a reminder that Hollywood used to make movies for, you know, adults: There's some sex here, but it's not fun. There are no explosions, on-screen at least. It's about the quietest thriller you'll ever see. If you're not a cinephile, and if you're relatively young, it's possible you haven't heard of it. Go ahead. Give it a try.

2: The movie is well-known for its contemplation of the surveillance society that Americans were only then becoming dimly aware that we lived in. (Spying? That stuff's for Russians!) On second viewing — I last saw it about 15 years ago — what strikes me is how much the movie is about perception, and how having the different pieces of a puzzle very much affects what you think the puzzle might look like when whole. If I were to create a mini movie marathon, I'd package it together with "Rashomon" and Christopher Nolan's "Memento."

3: The score, featuring piano compositions by David Shire, is simply gorgeous. Here's Soundtrack.net summing it up beautifully: "As Harry Caul is a stoic, taciturn character, Coppola understood that much of his underlying repression and sadness fell into the hands of the music. What the film ends up with, and it works like gangbusters, is a central character who refuses to say much of anything about his own personal life, but a score that tells you everything anyway."

Bonus thought: Two days after Donald Trump was elected president, darn tootin' I was in the mood for a paranoid thriller.

Bonus Bonus: Tie for funniest unintentionally funny scene: Gene Hackman being followed by a mime. Gene Hackman pretending to play the saxaphone.

* Ok, actually Amazon Prime this time.

Netflix Queue: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

Three thoughts about E.T., coming up after the trailer....

1. My family watched E.T. tonight — for me, the first full sit-through since I originally saw the movie as a 9-year-old in 1982. Back then, popular movies stuck around in the theaters for a few months; they didn't do all their business the first week or two. So after months of increasing word-of-mouth, my parents took us to see. I remember crying when E.T. died and shouting with joy when the kids took off into the air on their bicycles.

My 7-year-old son didn't get teary-eyed tonight. But the adults did. And when Elliott and ET took the air and sailed "across the moon," my boy did, in fact, shout out with delight. What can I say? It made me happy the movie can still connect, and it made me happy that my blockbuster-blitzed son isn't already jaded.

2. One thing Spielberg does in the movie is create the world as a children's world. Something I'd never noticed before: Except for Dee Wallace, as E.T.'s mother, you never directly see an adult's face for the entire movie until Peter Coyote shows his, three-quarters of the way in, after the family's house has been sealed off and quarantined.

3. Henry Thomas as Elliott: Gives an amazing performance by a child actor, actually. So does Drew Barrymore. They feel real, not like kids acting. Some of that, I'm sure, has to be Spielberg's directing.

Bonus point: Since I obsessively re-watch movies I love, why no return visit to E.T. until now? I'm not sure. I think I was afraid I'd find it overly saccharine as an adult. That didn't turn out to be the case. But it might be also true that I did revisit E.T. obsessively when I was a kid: My uncle owned the movie's novelization — do they still do that? — and I read and re-read that paperback until it literally fell apart. The movie I created in my mind's eye was as rich as what had appeared on screen, and for a long time, it served my purposes.

And yes: For several years, I fantasized about finding my own extra-terrestrial. Never happened.

Netflix Queue: No, Punisher isn't "Daredevil's" most moral character

I actually enjoy Marvel on Netflix better than most of what the company brings to the big screen. So this piece at The Federalist caught my eye:

The Punisher, who murders dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the second season of Netflix’s “Daredevil,” is actually the most moral character on the show. 

Daredevil, who’s willing to break every law and ethical rule on the road to putting villains in useless prisons but unwilling to go any further, willingly participates in a vicious cycle that makes a mockery of justice. Allowing the revolving door of crime to continue ad infinitum is naive at best and immoral at worst. The Punisher realizes this and attempts to end the cycle instead.

Through murder, of course.

Now, we're talking about comic book characters here, so this probably isn't a topic worth dwelling on too long but a counterpoint is needed here. If your viewpoint is that there's good and evil and evil can only be overcome by being destroyed, maybe the writer — Stephen Gutowski — has a point.

But if your moral framework includes the possibility of redemption — of being lost, then found; of making the journey from darkness into light — then the Punisher's ethos has to be reconsidered.

Gutowski all but calls Daredevil a "wimp" in his piece here, and it's true that Matt Murdock's angst in the Netflix show can get a bit overbearing sometimes. But it's interesting that Gutowski never quotes Murdock's defense of his "take them off the streets but let them live" approach:

DD: What about hope? 

P: Oh, f*ck. DD: Come on, Frank... 

P: You wanna talk about Santa Claus? 

DD: You wanna talk about Santa Claus? I live in the real world too, and I've seen it. 

P: Yeah? What have you seen? 

DD: Redemption, Frank. P: Ah, Jesus Christ. 

DD: It's real. And it's possible. The people you murder deserve another chance. 

P: What, to kill again? Rape again? Is that what you want? 

DD: No, Frank. To try again, Frank. (panting) To try.

I'm lapsed in my own faith, but I'm reminded (as I so often am) of John 8:

8 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees *brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they *said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, [a]Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”]

If Jesus wanted to guarantee the woman sinned no more, of course, he could have stood by and watched as the Pharisees killed her. Instead, he reminded everybody of their own moral failings, and admonished her to do better.

Morality untempered by humility, given the power over life and death, is often twisted into something ugly and, frankly, immoral in and of itself. It's a tension that makes for great storytelling — the Punisher is a great character, and so is Javert, and hell, so is the John Lithgow character in "Footloose." Frank Castle might be "Daredevil's" most interesting character this season, but most moral? Nah. That's too easy.

Netflix Queue: The Master

Lots of thoughts inspired by my viewing of The Master on Netflix, but the easiest to convey is this: Joaquin Phoenix's face in this movie is an amazing thing, a craggy and broken down work of art. So amazingly photographed by Paul Thomas Anderson and his crew.

The best of Netflix Instant for 2011

Looking back at my viewing logs, it's amazing to me how much I used Netflix to watch old TV shows this year. There are two reasons for it: A) Again, the three surgeries really killed my concentration and steered me to "comfort food." B) My son, now 3, is old enough to understand stuff I don't want him to be exposed to. So that means grownup movies often wait until he goes to sleep. Which is often too late to start a movie.

That said, I know people complain about the selection at Netflix Instant, but I don't usually have a hard time finding something I like to watch. Here were some of my favorite Netflix movies of 2011:

"I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK"

"Jet Li's Fearless"

Woody Allen's "Love and Death"

"A Room with a View"

"Eat Drink Man Woman"

"The Red Balloon"

"Wing Chun"

"Bodyguards and Assassins"

"The Dirty Dozen"

"The Black Stallion"

"A World Without Thieves"

"Salt"

"Patton"

"Drunken Master"

"Harvey"

"The Italian Job" (Michael Caine original)

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (Walter Matthau original)

"The Bride of Frankenstein"

"Let The Right One In"

"The Twilight Samurai"

"Mean Streets"

"Kelly's Heroes"

"The Specials"

"Election" and "Triad Election"

"Hudson Hawk"

Some good TV I watched on Netflix: The entirety of "Mad Men" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," as well as Season One of "Breaking Bad."

And it's worth mentioning a couple of movies I saw on Amazon Video on Demand and Vudu that were pretty good: "13 Assassins," "Rango," and "Ip Man 2."

So it was a very Chinese/Japanese movie year for me, with some World War II sprinkled in. Not too bad.

Netflix Queue: "The Quick and the Dead"

Three thoughts about "The Quick and the Dead":

* Sam Raimi's 1995 film is clearly a riff on the old Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone -- encompassing everything from the credited name of Sharon Stone's character ("Lady") to the Ennio Morricone-light soundtrack. And I'm really fine with that: Hollywood westerns are basically American mythmaking, anyway, so revisiting and tweaking those myths to put (say) a woman at the center of the action is fine by me. No, it's not history. But it can be fun -- as this flick mostly is. Still, Clint Eastwood never cried in his westerns; I wish Sharon Stone hadn't cried in hers.

* Then again, Sharon Stone -- though she was a producer on the film -- may not have been quite up to the acting level of her compatriots in this film: Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo Dicaprio, Gary Sinise, Keith David and a bunch of other character actors whose faces you'll certainly recognize. It's a powerhouse cast, and that unfortunately makes Stone's line readings a bit more noticeably thin.

* Then again, while it's a really entertaining film -- and I'm kind of shocked nobody turned it into a "Street Fighter" video game -- there are some real howlers in the script-writing department. TQATD's final line is this: "The law has come back to town." Delivered, I believe, without any awareness of irony. But it is, unfortunately, hilarious. But Raimi directed, and he knows a thing or two about hilarity in extreme situations, so maybe I should give the benefit of the doubt. It is, however Sharon Stone, so maybe I shouldn't.

* BONUS THOUGHT: Her persona has long since overwhelmed our notions of Sharon Stone, but I sometimes forget: She really was an extraordinarily beautiful woman back in the day.

Netflix Queue: "Space Cowboys"

Three thoughts about Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys":

* I'm shocked that Eastood and Tommy Lee Jones could appear in the same movie without Hollywood imploding under the weight of all that laconic.

* The movie was pitched to the public as an action-comedy, but it's a Clint Eastwood action-comedy. This means, among other things, that the movie is somewhat gently paced: It doesn't hit you with the gag-every-five-seconds pace of today's films. It also means, of course, that somebody sympathetic dies at the end. But it's a fun film, so it's a good death. Oh, Clint Eastwood.

* I think I prefer out-and-out science fiction and fantasy to movies set in the real space program. My mind keeps picking out discrepancies between Hollywood-NASA and real-NASA. Too distracting for an old space nerd like me.

Still, an enjoyable flick. Three out of four stars.

Netflix Queue: "Ichi the Killer"

No.

To elaborate: There's two movies in "Ichi the Killer." One is a sly subversion of superhero myths -- particularly "Batman." We're always told that Batman/Bruce Wayne is kind of a freak, but really: If you were a billionaire industrialist, wouldn't you be tempted to become a city's crime-fighting savior with really cool cars and utility belts? But our "hero" in this movie, Ichi, really is twisted and broken. The villain, Kakihara is reminiscent of the Joker with his facial scars, but takes his penchant for chaos-born-of-ennui to depth that Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger wouldn't have been able to contemplate for a mainstream American movie. And there's a third, very important character: the henchman. For him, the story isn't an exciting villain-versus-hero duel -- it's a tragedy. The subversion extends all the way to the movie's confrontation between Ichi and Kakihara.

Unfortunately, that movie is buried beneath another one so filled with torture-porn style violence and misogyny that I can't possibly recommend it.

I want to like "Ichi the Killer." But despite its merits, it feels harmful.

Netflix Queue: 'Irma Vep'

When "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" came out on DVD nearly a decade ago, it had a great, compelling and dramatic movie to offer "Star Wars" fans. Unfortunately, it wasn't "The Phantom Menace." Instead, included among the extras, was an hour-long unnarrated "making of" documentary that proved far more dramatic and engaging in its depiction of George Lucas than anything Lucas managed to put up on the screen himself.

For whatever reason, though, I've never managed to get into movies or shows that purport to depict show business from behind the camera. "30 Rock" is an exception because it's not really about the creation of an SNL-type live comedy show; that just happens to be the workplace of your typical NBC workplace comedy. I can add another entry to my short list of exceptions: "Irma Vep," a 1996 movie from France.

A quick rundown: Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung -- playing herself, and doing so delightfully -- is brought to Paris to play the lead in the remake of a classic silent film about female vampires. The production proves a mess, undone by the failing powers of its once-great director and the petty jealousies that infect any small group of highly talented, highly competitive people.

Given such a description, "Irma Vep" sounds, perhaps, like one of your run-of-the-mill Christopher Guest mockumentaries. Being French, however, it so much more sensuous -- filled with scenes of driving through Paris streets at night, intensely evoking the bittersweetness of an unrequited crush. At one point, Cheung -- trying to connect to her character in the movie-within-a-movie -- dons a latex catsuit and climbs to the rain-drench rooftop of her hotel. Immediately, the viewer can see how much craft has been brought to the scene -- if only because we earlier saw how badly botched a similar effort was in the movie-within-a-movie. But such cleverness isn't the only thing going on here, because that would be merely cynical.

There's also celebration. Because, honestly: Watching Maggie Chung creep around in a catsuit in the dark rain is the reason movies were invented. The scene -- and the movie -- are unexpectedly beautiful.

Netflix Queue: 'The Men Who Stare At Goats'

A recent New York Times interview with Elliot Gould lamented that -- 40 years after "MASH," nobody is making good American war comedies anymore, a loss to be lamented all the more because there are some aspects of the last decade of tragedy and death that are in ripe need of satire.

Don't listen to the Times. Yes, there's been tons of anti-war schlock out of Hollywood, failures that are cause for joy among conservatives every time one goes down in flames. But the new era has given at least one fairly entertaining war satire: "The Men Who Stare At Goats."

Now: It's not a great movie. It's a deeply flawed movie, in some respects, clumsily playing for pathos near the end -- and coming up with a trick in its last second (literally) that weakened the whole "do they have powers or not?" structure of the flick. And structuring it around the home life of the journalist played by Ewan McGregor was, well, a misfire.

What's more, the movie wasn't really pitched as a war satire in the previews like the one above. Instead, it's sold as a wacky comedy -- more "Sgt. Bilko" with Jedi powers, maybe, instead of "MASH." But most of the movie is set in Iraq during the 2003 invasion -- and it plays for laughs gun battles between Blackwater-type private security contractors, the confusion of Americans unable to distinguish Al Qaeda from common local criminals and, yes, the torture of Iraqis.

Mostly this got missed by critics when the movie came out in 2009 -- focusing on the absurdities of a small-bore program (allegedly) started by the U.S. government instead of what the movie had to say about the big-picture absurdities of our presence in Baghdad. That's ok. The movie only made $32 million at the box office, but I suspect it will age well and garner a new a devoted audience in the years to come. Like the Iraq War itself, it may prove more popular after the fact.

Netflix Queue: 'Tetsuo: Iron Man'

Really. I don't even know how to discuss this movie. What I can say is that I thought about Takashi Miike's horrifying "Ichi The Killer" tonight, and opted for what I thought would be the less-disturbing flick.

I was wrong.

I won't even attempt a summary. Here's the Netflix description:

Soon after he accidentally runs down a man with a fetish for implanting scrap metal into his body (Shinya Tsukamoto, who also directs), a businessman (Tomorowo Taguchi) begins eerily morphing into a hybrid man-machine, accompanied by twisted, metal-related nightmares. Is the metal fetishist somehow controlling the transformation? Now, the businessman must track down the man he thought he killed before the horrific metamorphosis is complete.

But that makes the flick sound much more benign than it is. A friend called it "torture porn," but that doesn't seem quite right. It also doesn't seem inaccurate, either. There's a lot of phallic imagery in this movie; the main character's penis does, in fact, transform into a giant working drill bit that is put to the expected horrifying uses. So: Not exactly a pleasant evening.

The movie's only about an hour long, and almost completely free of dialogue, but the rapid-fire editing -- if it doesn't trigger a seizure -- ends up being tedious at times. Still, these are movies I thought of, visually and thematically, while watching "Tetsuo":

* Akira Kurosawa's late 1940s work.

* The collected films of Terry Gilliam.

* "Edward Scissorhands"

* "Alien: Resurrection"

* "Godzilla"

* "Eraserhead"

* "Pi"

* "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

* "Crash" (David Cronenberg edition)

* "Planet of the Apes"

One doesn't need to have "fun" watching a movie to appreciate it. But more than a lot of taboo-challenging movies I've seen -- I'm thinking of the "Vengeance Trilogy" and "Three Extremes" here -- I feel somewhat traumatized having seen it. Maybe I'm getting older. I don't know. Whatever: I can't really recommend this film.

Netflix Queue: 'Die Hard: With A Vengeance' is almost a better movie than you think

If "Die Hard: With A Vengeance" had been a standalone movie, instead of the third installment in a franchise...

...and if it had been made in 1975 instead of 1995...

...and if its second-half hadn't been overstuffed with the cliched tropes of 1990s overstuffed action movies...

...then the movie might be fondly remembered as a great heist movie instead of a middling entry in the Bruce Willis/Samuel Jackson oeuvre, one that's not all-that-remembered and even less-watched today.

But it's shocking how close the movie comes to a kind of "Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (the original) Hollywood greatness. (Here's a synopsis if you need a refresher.) In some respects, it's the best of the "Die Hard" bunch.

Why?

* For one thing, the movie stands alone in its real-world texturing. Whereas the first installment took place in a generic LA office building and the second in a generic airport, much of DHWAV is identifiably set on the streets -- and parks, in a somewhat famous race-against-the-clock scene -- in New York City. I'm a sucker for on-location shooting with a minimum of green-screen or CGI; I like my gritty cop movies to be, well, gritty. When the fourth installment came around a few years ago, it had ballooned into CGI ludicrousness -- Bruce Willis on the back of a Harrier jump jet? Really?* -- but this installment was firmly planted in a recognizable reality.

(*No, not really. That's a similar scene in "True Lies." In the last "Die Hard" film, though, Willis does take out a jump jet that's after him. And it's still ludicrous.)

* Before he meets John McClane, Samuel L. Jackson's character -- Zeus -- is established about as deftly as Hollywood can in the span of 90 seconds to two minutes. Two young boys bring a stolen stereo into Zeus' pawn shop and we quickly learn that A) he's no dummy, B) he keeps a watchful eye out in the community, C) he's a strong advocate of education as empowerment and D) he's got a little black power thing going on. Here, in exactly 20 lines, is the exchange that tells us everything we need to know about Zeus:

Zeus: Now, where you goin'?
Dexter: School.
Zeus: Why?
Raymond: To get educated.
Zeus: *Why*?
Dexter: So we can go to college.
Zeus: And why is that important?
Dexter: To get es-pect.
Zeus: RE-spect. Now, who's the bad guys?
Dexter: Guys who sell drugs.
Raymond: Guys who have guns.
Zeus: And who's the good guys?
Dexter: We're the good guys.
Zeus: Who's gonna help you?
Raymond: Nobody.
Zeus: *So who's gonna help you*?
Dexter: We're gonna help ourselves.
Zeus: And who do we not want to help us?
Dexter, Raymond: White people.
Zeus: That's right. Now get on outta here. Go to school.

Is that an archetype? Sure. But it's an expertly drawn archetype.

* If the movie had been made in 1975, too, the racial interaction between McClane and Zeus would maybe go down a little better. Both because, oddly, that era would've treated the subject with a little more frankness -- and it's "we all get along when we work together" ending wouldn't have seemed quite as suspect as it did 20 years later. As it is, there are too many scenes like this:

John McClane: I'll put my foot up your ass, you dumb, mother...
Zeus: Say it! Say it!
John McClane: What?
Zeus: You were gonna call me a nigger, weren't you?
John McClane: No I wasn't!
Zeus: Yes you were! What were you gonna call me?
John McClane: Asshole! How's that, asshole!

It's weird, too, that the movie makes racism seem to be, well, almost entirely Samuel L. Jackson's problem. The white people are all cool! It's the black people who just don't want to get along with their constant prickliness! Maybe the screenwriters felt they needed to get the mismatched-buddy-cop-movie tension going on -- say like "Lethal Weapon." This wasn't an effective way to do it.

* And like I said earlier, the movie -- full of riddles and puns and a heist for McClane and Zeus to solve -- is great fun until it's time to wrap things up. Things get generic: We see run-of-the-mill action, and our first shots of obvious green screen and CGI. A potentially great movie goes off track. And the ending ends up being an noisy bit of violence with some dumb macho wordplay. Unmemorable.

The shame of it is, this was almost the ending:



It's imperfect. Sure, there's a bit of "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" going on here. But a quiet ending to a big Bruce Willis action flick goes against the grain, no? And the game-playing more neatly fits the riddles-and-quizzes action that dominated the rest of the movie.

One more note: It's impossible to watch a movie made before 2001 lightly. There are bombs going off in Manhattan, and scared people fleeing explosions -- and the World Trade Center in the background. It's difficult not to feel an ache.

Oh well. "Die Hard: With A Vengeance" had it within its grasp to be great. It got halfway there. And because of that, it's a better movie than you remember.

Netflix Queue: Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

It's like "Batman Begins" meets "The Empire Strikes Back" in 15th century Thailand. And he beats up an elephant!

Sadly, that pitch is far more interesting than the movie. Tony Jaa is losing his mojo.

Netflix Queue: Yojimbo/A Fistful Of Dollars

I guess I knew that Sergio Leone copied Akira Kurosawa, but still it's striking to see these movies back-to-back.And it's even more striking when you think about the career of Clint Eastwood: You mean to say that the foremost icon of late 20th century American manhood -- his squints, his three-day beard, his laconic style leavened with the occasional wisecrack, the jaw stroking and so much more that made Clint Clint -- got his entire shtick from a Japanese guy?

It's like finding out that Dodge muscle cars were based on Toyotas. Really AWESOME Toyotas that you never knew existed.

Netflix Queue: "Let The Right One In"

How to explain? It's like Harold & Maude, only if both characters appeared to be 12 years old and Maude was actually a vampire. And if it had the icy surroundings and slowly building sense of dread as in The Shining. With Scott Farkus from A Christmas Story making an appearance as Harold's tormenter. Oh yeah, and it's all in Swedish -- with all the awkward touches of pre-adolescent sexuality that might imply.

Does that describe it? It's the best I can do.