“Actually our work depends on how much we can appropriate from other people’s work! Painting, music, films, literature … it’s all grist for the mill. We think of our work not as individual creativity but like a lifelong baton relay. Your work passes through your body and your life; you transform it into something, and then you pass it on to the next generation.” Hiyao Miyazaki interviewed by Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun Times, October 1999

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Written by Hayao Miyazaki
Produced by Toru Hara
86 minutes

Picking a film produced by Studio Ghibli is like tasting sushi when you’ve been raised on a diet of meat and potatoes animation from Walt Disney or Hanna-Barbera your whole life. The world of Hayao Miyazaki is one without heroes to cheer, villains to hiss at or talking animals to cue laughter. There are families and houses. Children learn to deal with change and to assume greater responsibility. In addition, the unseen surrounds them. As the story begins, there’s a slight feeling of unease, as well as fascination as the invisible world reveals itself. No film from Miyazaki exemplifies these sublime characteristics like the first to bring him an international audience, My Neighbor Totoro. 10-year-old Satsuki Kusakabe and her bratty 4-year-old sister Mei settle into life in the countryside, where their professor father has moved them to be closer to their mother, who recuperates from a long illness at a local hospital.

The Kusakabes are both excited and disquieted to discover their new house is inhabited by soot sprites, harmless creatures which scatter from light and whisper in the rafters. While Satsuki attends school, Mei explores the yard. There, Mei encounters two forest spirits, overstuffed rabbits which lead her into a magnificent camphor tree where the girl finds an even bigger forest spirit snoozing. Offering the name “Totoro”, the spirit vanishes before Satsuzki can meet him. She gets her chance while waiting for her father’s bus in a downpour and makes an impression on Totoro by introducing him to an umbrella. The spirits return the generosity of the Kusakabes by sprouting their garden to enormous heights. The spirits are unable to heal the girls’ mother and after losing her temper with her sister, Satsuki blames herself when Mei disappears. When search efforts by the townspeople falter, Totoro and his friends step in.

For his fourth feature film, animator Hayao Miyazaki sought a return to his childhood in Sayama Hills, which was farmland in the 1950s before it became suburban Tokyo. Miyazaki’s mother spent many years under bed rest with spinal tuberculosis, a detail that worked its way into the story. Executives at Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co. didn’t feel that sketches of Miyazaki’s nature spirits looked promising, so producer Toshio Suzuki proposed that Totoro be made in tandem with an adaptation of the novel Grave of the Fireflies and released as a double feature. A modest box office success in Japan, Miyazaki’s output began attracting comparisons to Walt Disney. Reaching an agreement with Tokuma for worldwide video distribution of Miyazaki’s films, The Walt Disney Company produced an English language dub of My Neighbor Totoro in 2005 featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning and Tim Daly as the Kusakabes.

Miyazaki’s compositions have fantastic depth of field, basking light on the old farmhouses, lush forests and rice fields the characters move past. To those who grew up on Josie and the Pussycats, the novelty of My Neighbor Totoro isn’t just the animation, but its spiritual depth. Respect for the natural world and an open mind toward the unseen course through the story, not as teaching points, but as an alternative to the lifestyle the Kusakabes are retreating from. My Neighbor Totoro is a bounty of both joy and imagination, as if Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are had been adapted for an Eastern audience. The girls are stricken early on with a giddiness that doesn’t cross over very well, something Miyazaki would change with his Oscar winning Spirited Away in 2001, but the pure enjoyment of the film is how different it is. Instead of catering to what the we expect, this magic carpet takes us somewhere different.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 75,711 users: 94% for My Neighbor Totoro

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“George Lucas said the most useful thing to me as I was about to do Body Heat. I said ‘George, I don’t know that much about the technical stuff.’ And keep in mind that George is Mr. Technology, right? He said ‘Making movies has nothing to do with the technical stuff. It has everything to do with what kind of person you are.’ It was the most important thing anyone ever said to me about directing. I had a lot of confidence in the sort of person I was. I knew the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I knew the kind of atmosphere I wanted to create on my set. I knew the kind of life I wanted to live and how I wanted my work to embody that life, so the fact that I didn’t know anything technically didn’t really matter.” Lawrence Kasdan interviewed by Alex Simon for Venice Magazine, September 2001

Body Heat (1981)
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Written by Lawrence Kasdan
Produced by Fred T. Gallo
113 minutes

To call Body Heat the greatest dirty movie ever mounted by Hollywood wouldn’t be giving Lawrence Kasdan enough credit for the agility in which story, character, dialogue, mood and mystery come together in his directorial debut, along with some of the most combustive sex ever thrown down on film. Instead of feeling like a relic of what filmmakers were getting past the MPAA at the time, this is one movie whose temperature rises with each viewing. As the Florida town of Miranda Beach melts under a heatwave, attorney Ned Racine (William Hurt) divides his time between bedding nurses or meter maids and defending penny ante crooks in Okeelanta County Court. Entertained by Racine’s tales of wanton sexual lust, Assistant County Prosecutor Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) and Detective Oscar Grace (J.A. Preston) are also aware of Racine’s desire for a score that will satisfy his financial needs.

Cooling off on the Miranda Beach boardwalk, Racine’s dick leads him after a stunning blonde in a white blouse named Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Matty maintains that she’s married, but rather than discourage Ned’s come-ons, hints that she’s game for more than talk. Ned tracks Matty down to a bar in the waterfront town of Pinehaven and his scruffy charms win him an invitation back to Matty’s home to “see” her wind chimes. Needing more than just garden decor, Ned smashes into Matty’s home and the couple plunge into an explosive affair. Seeing how miserable Matty is married to real estate investor Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna), Ned works out a scheme to make Edmund’s murder look like a botched arson, ignoring the advice of a grateful client, rock ‘n roll arsonist Teddy Lewis (Mickey Rourke). Sure enough, the more Ned learns about Matty Walker, the more it seems she’s setting him up.

With his original screenplays The Bodyguard and Continental Divide finding buyers and George Lucas hiring him to write Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan was red hot when he began turning down work in 1979. Alan Ladd Jr., president of Twentieth Century Fox, inquired why and Kasdan answered that he wanted to write and direct his own films, specifically, a film noir of his generation. When Ladd left the studio to form his own company and Fox’s new regime put Body Heat into turnaround, the mogul invited Kasdan to make his directorial debut for The Ladd Company if he found a “sponsor” who could give the project some leverage. The first time director approached Lucas, who balked at putting the Lucasfilm label on a movie titled Body Heat, but as de facto executive producer, promised Ladd he would cover any budget overruns out of his own pocket.

What makes Body Heat so hot and bothered isn’t sex, but foreplay. Kasdan puts us in a novel location, builds mood and reveals the desires of his characters with dashes of wit and kinkiness before we get to watch anyone fuck. Instead of using sex to intensify the story, the story intensifies the sex. Plucked off the soap opera The Doctors by casting director Wally Nicita for her film debut, Kathleen Turner embodies a woman any man might contemplate committing murder to possess. Turner handles the vulnerability and the gentle cunning of Matty Walker with as much gusto as she does the sexuality. Kasdan’s flawless script builds mystique by leaving Matty’s true nature ambiguous until the final shot. While we can see the end coming, Ned never does, which makes it feel surprising. Equally mesmerizing are the amiable sleaze summoned by William Hurt, the electricity of Mickey Rourke (in his breakout role) and an elegant noir musical score by John Barry.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 8,664 users: 71% for Body Heat

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

Q: “You were working in a special niche of your own in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders and Southern Comfort — lean, elegiac films which, I’m guessing, benefited from modest budgets and expectations, as well as low producer interference.”

A: “Yes, that niche no longer exists. The middle ground has largely fallen out of the studio system.”

Patrick McGilligan interviewing Walter Hill for Film International in September 1996

The Long Riders (1980)
Directed by Walter Hill
Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith and Stacy Keach & James Keach
Produced by Tim Zinneman
99 minutes

If crowd pleasers like Tombstone are pop music renditions of the Old West, The Long Riders is like vintage bluegrass. With the well earned authenticity of a musician jamming for the pure love of his craft, the first western directed by Walter Hill is a master class in how atmosphere, pacing and performance can elevate a B-movie programmer into something greater than a plot synopsis might indicate. In Missouri after the Civil War, hard put and desperate men looking to make a living under the heel of Reconstruction rob a bank. Led by the steely Jesse James (James Keach) and his brother Frank James (Stacy Keach), the gang includes the deadly Cole Younger (David Carradine), dapper Jim Younger (Keith Carradine) and dorky Bob Younger (Robert Carradine). Along for the job is Clell Miller (Randy Quaid) who’s as dependable as his brother Ed (Dennis Quaid) is unreliable.

The bandits return home to contemplate settling down. Jesse marries his sweetheart (Savannah Smith) while Jim courts a redhead (Amy Stryker) engaged to the no count Ed Miller. Cole Younger hesitates to make an honest woman out of Belle Shirley (Pamela Reed) and the vivacious whore settles in Texas, where she marries hotheaded Sam Starr (James Remar) and takes the name Belle Starr. The success of the James-Younger gang against trains of the Union Pacific Railroad puts them in the crosshairs of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose agents draw the wrath of the entire region when they gun down a 15-year-old Younger and firebomb the home of Jesse James’ mother (Fran Ryan). The gang meet their Waterloo in Northfield, Minnesota, forcing Jesse to recruit the oily Ford brothers Bob (Nicholas Guest) and Charlie (Christopher Guest). Their betrayal earns the Fords a spot in history alongside Jesse James.

Stacy Keach and his brother James Keach were cast as Wilbur and Orville Wright for a public television drama that aired in 1971. They kidded that after playing the Wright brothers, their next project together should focus on “the wrong brothers”. Taking their joke seriously, the Keaches arrived on outlaws Frank & Jesse James and spent nine years struggling to get The Long Riders into production, with playwright Bill Bryden, screenwriter Steven Phillip Smith and the Keaches writing scripts. The actor brothers had David, Keith & Robert Carradine set to join them as the Youngers, Randy & Dennis Quaid as the Millers and Beau & Jeff Bridges as the treacherous Fords. Cast in Hurricane, James Keach met producer Tim Zinneman, who saw a movie there and helped attach Walter Hill as director. Guitarist Ry Cooder would be entrusted by Hill to compose and arrange the music, beginning a collaboration that would span two decades.

In spite of its casting scheme, the real star of The Long Riders is Ry Cooder, who utilizes Civil War ballads and rapturous bluegrass to provide texture to the tough, contentious world of Jesse James. It’s a place where strangers become friends by sharing that they served under the Stars and Bars and conversely, playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” can get a guitar player shot. The Long Riders makes little effort to document who James was and the film is so much better off for it. The loosely sewn narrative tested audiences at the time, yet the approach fits the material seamlessly: defeated but dangerous men drifting through the postwar South. Highlights include David Carradine and James Remar locked in an epic knife duel, while the scenes between Carradine and Pamela Reed crackle with wit and sexual energy. As action films go, this is one that genuinely loves women.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,017 users: 70% for The Long Riders

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from beginning to end, from plot decision to the final scene — which has been used before on The Twilight Zone.” Stephen King interviewed for Playboy Magazine, June 1983

The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
Produced by Stanley Kubrick
146 minutes (original U.S. theatrical version)/ 144 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)/ 119 minutes (international version)

Debating whether or not Jack Nicholson’s fortissimo performance in The Shining — as a family man who slips into homicidal insanity during his season as caretaker of a haunted hotel — needed to be played at such a high volume is like debating whether Jimi Hendrix really needed to light a perfectly good electric guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. There may have been a perfectly good exercise in gothic terror and things that go bump in the night lurking within Stephen King‘s novel, but the film version was designed and constructed by Stanley Kubrick. Drawn up as a last will and testament to the horror genre as far as the high and mighty Kubrick was concerned, the film inflicts such psychic trauma on the viewer that it needs a joker like Jack in the deck to soften its wicked blow.

Striking ominous chords from the start, schoolteacher Jack Torrance (Nicholson) accepts a six month stint as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, encouraged that winter’s isolation will give him time to outline a novel. The general manager feels obligated to mention a tragedy in which a previous caretaker killed his wife and two daughters with an axe before shooting himself. Jack responds that his wife — a fan of “ghost stories and horror films” — will be thrilled. The skittish Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds the illustrious hotel spooky, while 7-year-old Danny (Danny Lloyd) receives visions of the future that are nothing short of terrifying. A departing cook (Scatman Crothers) confides to the boy that they share a special power his grandmother called ”shining”. Assured there’s nothing  to be scared of, Danny senses something bad lurking at the Overlook, particularly in Room 237.

Warner Bros. president John Calley knew that Stanley Kubrick had an interest in the paranormal and sent him a galleys copy of The Shining in 1977. Ignoring a first draft Stephen King had been contractually guaranteed to author, Kubrick adapted a script with novelist Diane Johnson, who was teaching a course on the gothic novel at UC Berkeley. Certain exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel would be filmed at the Timberline Lodge, on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. The vast majority of the film — including the hedge maze — was manufactured at Elstree Studios outside London. Filming commenced in May 1978 and given Kubrick’s refusal to be hurried through a schedule, didn’t wrap until April 1979. Kubrick tinkered with his film even after it was in U.S. theaters for five days, cutting an epilogue in which the general manager visits Wendy in the hospital.

The film departed so radically from his book  that Stephen King authored the teleplay for a 4-hour mini-series version that aired on ABC in 1997. Kubrick ignored many of the elements King found eerie — an elevator, a firehose, animal shaped shrubs — to focus instead on a child’s subconscious dread of a parent turning into a monster. The magnificence of The Shining is how Kubrick exploits that fear viscerally. Snippets of a blood soaked future flash through Danny’s mind while the corridors of the hotel breathe with living images of the past. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind provided electronic sound elements, which Kubrick sourced with music from classical composers György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki to create one of the most unnerving film scores ever. Criticized at the time for not watching enough horror movies, the bottom line is that Kubrick’s vision is scary as hell.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 423,027 users: 91% for The Shining

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say? The fan trailer below was superior to any I could find from Warner Bros.

“The interesting thing about Flesh+Blood is that when Paul was looking for music, he went to Luc Van de Ven, who has a record company, Prometheus Records, and he said, ‘What do you think, what kind of music should I use?’ and Luc played him Conan. That’s the score that took me to Paul. I think he had shown the film to James Horner and Horner said, ‘I can’t do that, it’s a terrible movie.’ And I just was, ‘I got to do it! This is the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life!’ and frankly, it really was. I loved it because I thought it was honest, and it was ruthless, and terrifyingly brutal, but what else would it be like? The whole marriage of politics and religion was brilliant.” — Basil Poledouris interviewed by Olivier Desbrosses in Ubeda, Spain, July 2006

Flesh + Blood (1985)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven, story by Gerard Soeteman
Produced by Gys Versluys
126 minutes

The Dutch filmmaker and cultural lightning rod’s first experience in Hollywood was not 1987′s critical and commercial sensation RoboCop. Paul Verhoeven actually made his English language directing debut two summers previous with Flesh + Blood, his first occasion to spar with the MPAA over censorship, American style. A quick release capsule of medieval death and eroticism, the film was bum rushed out of the U.S. box office, failing to launch action figures or sequels of any sort for its primary investor, Orion Pictures. Yet this relatively low budget pill holds up surprisingly well in a designer age of digital entertainment, delivering a potent kick of complex characterization, historical detail and brass balls, revving its sex and violence past legal limits in the United States.

Set in the way back of 1501 A.D., Flesh + Blood introduces a band of mercenaries receiving communion before they lay siege to a fortified city. The rabble includes an archer (Brion James), the very pregnant harlot he adores (Susan Tyrrell), a defrocked cardinal (Ronald Lacey) and various cutthroats and jezebels led by a charismatic soldier of fortune named Martin (Rutger Hauer). Promised 24 hours to ransack the homes of the rich if they can retake the city for its ousted lord Arnolfini (Fernando Hilbeck) and his captain of the guard Hawkwood (Jack Thompson), the rogues are observed by Arnolfini’s teenaged son Steven (Tom Burlinson), a cocksure engineer who aspires to the heights of Leonardo da Vinci. Victorious in battle, Martin and his band are double-crossed by Arnolfini Sr. and expelled from the city.

While Hawkwood retires to the countryside with a mute nun (Blanca Marsillach) he maimed during the invasion, Steven’s war booty arrives in the form of Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a daughter of aristocracy who enters marriage to Steven pure as the driven snow. The college boy announces he has career plans, but plans change when Martin and his marauders make off with his bride to be. More cunning than she appears, Agnes weighs her chastity against her odds of survival and throws herself at Martin sexually. This shifts the balance of power in the band, which storms a castle they fail to realize sits in a valley beset by the Black Plague. Steven coerces Hawkwood out of retirement to save Agnes, who may not be in as desperate need of rescuing as her prince believes.

Verhoeven and writing partner Gerard Soeteman had amassed medieval research dating back to their 1969 Dutch television series Floris starring Rutger Hauer. Their full throttled script for Flesh + Blood is woven with subject matter as fascinating as it is disparate: the Black Plague, piracy, 16th century mechanical engineering, Catholicism. An onslaught of debauchery that proved too flagrant for the MPAA to award an R rating without cuts, the irony of Flesh + Blood is that amid the impaled chests and bare bottoms, its characters (particularly the ladies played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Susan Tyrrell) possess far greater humanity than the caricatures of generic Hollywood action films. The outstanding international cast is mirrored on the other side of the camera by Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont and American composer Basil Poledouris.

Reading in the tub. Jennifer Aniston, The Good Girl (2002)

Recovering in the tub. Liv Tyler, The Strangers (2008)

Grooming in the tub. Claire Danes, Shopgirl (2005)

Sleeping in the tub. Gabrielle Anwar, Body Snatchers (1993)

Pondering in the tub. Meryl Streep, The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Chopsticks”, “Slacker” and “Fitting Room” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

Shopgirl (2005)
Directed by Anand Tucker
Screenplay by Steve Martin, based on his novella
Produced by Ashok Amritraj, Jon Jashni, Steve Martin
106 minutes

As dazzling as Christmas pageant and equally bloated, Shopgirl is blessed and dogged by its formality. Not exactly an autobiographical account, Steve Martin drew on 25 years of relationships for a novella, published in 2000. A film version was set up at Lakeshore Entertainment, with director Anand Tucker and actress Claire Danes attached. Thrown into turnaround, film rights were picked up by Ashok Amritraj, who was sold on the property while working with Martin on Bringing Down the House in 2002. The former tennis pro’s production company Hyde Park Entertainment had a deal with Touchstone Pictures and once Jason Schwartzman took a role vacated by Jimmy Fallon at the last minute, they had a movie. A 45-day schedule commenced October 2003 in Beverly Hills and Silverlake. Several of the interiors were filmed at Delfino Studios in Sylmar.

Steve Martin had gambled on Englishman Mick Jackson to direct his script L.A. Story and 14 years later, the Thailand born, U.K. bred Anand Tucker certainly brings a European depth to Martin’s material. Deliberately paced and nearly devoid of chuckles, the approach is eye popping, a poor man’s David Fincher for better or for worse. Claire Danes & Jason Schwartzman are superbly cast as L.A. lovers who meet a year too soon, but Martin’s subdued older gentleman intrudes like an afterthought from a previous draft. Shopgirl is worth watching for Danes, whose gifts of refinement seem rarely in demand for high concept Hollywood these days. David Cronenberg’s frequent DP Peter Suschitzky provided the carnivale lighting scheme, though the musical score by Barrington Pheloung suggests something heartbreaking is set to occur at any moment.

In Beverly Hills, Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) is relegated to working the lonely 3rd floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, where she sells the antiquated women’s garment of hand gloves. Returning to her plain apartment building in Silverlake, Mirabelle dedicates herself to etchings, which she sells here or there to local art galleries. The Vermont native otherwise toils in obscurity, hoping someone important heralds her unique talent. At the Launder Land coin-op laundry, Mirabelle instead meets the slovenly Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a fellow artist who stencils fonts of his own design onto amplifiers. After an awkward first date totally devoid of chemistry, she throws Jeremy’s phone number in the trash. Succumbing to loneliness, Mirabelle initiates a sexual tryst that ends up being cut short by her reclusive house cat.

Back at Saks, Mirabelle receives a customer in the silver haired Ray Porter (Steve Martin), whose reserved approach and taste in shoes catch her eye. The mystery man sends Mirabelle a gift of gloves attached to a dinner invitation, which she accepts after he pays her work station another visit. A Seattle logistician who rents a home in Los Angeles so he won’t have to spend time packing when visits, Ray plays it proper with the emotionally maturing Mirabelle, making a speech the morning after they consummate their affair that his job doesn’t permit a long-term relationship. Mirabelle translates this as Ray planning on being with her long term as soon as work permits it. While Ray continues to keep Mirabelle at arm’s length, Jeremy follows her advice, showing some initiative in his field. Finding great success, he returns to Mirabelle a man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 17,747 users: 51% for Shopgirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 62 for Shopgirl

What do you say?

This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Gloves”, “Art Gallery” and “Pilates” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

The Good Girl (2002)
Directed by Miguel Arteta
Written by Mike White
Produced by Matthew Greenfield
93 minutes

Saying that The Good Girl is the best movie Jennifer Aniston has appeared in doesn’t give it nearly the credit it deserves. Pasadena native Mike White had pictured a career as a playwright in New York, but returning home, wrote two dark comedies — Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl — which helped land him a job on the writing staff of Dawson’s Creek in 1998. White showed his work to a college buddy named Miguel Arteta, who’d grown up in Puerto Rico and flunked out of the documentary program at Harvard before meeting White at Wesleyan University. A graduate of the AFI, Arteta was interested in The Good Girl, but White refused, hoping he could direct it himself. The pair tackled the controversial Chuck & Buck first and after several actresses got cold feet about playing Justine Fast, White suggested Jennifer Aniston for the part.

With Aniston on board, another Wesleyan alum named Matthew Greenfield secured roughly $7 million in financing from Myriad Pictures. To accommodate Aniston’s schedule taping Friends in Burbank, The Good Girl was filmed in Simi Valley, with the actress clocking seven-day work weeks for a chance to break out of rom-com jail. Screened for the first time at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, The Good Girl posted strong reviews and turned a profit in limited release. With humor so dry it could keep paint from sticking, Mike White’s writing isn’t for everybody, injecting brutal honesty into the hijinks. But the quality of the material is evident by the talent of the cast assembled around Aniston, with John C. Reilly & Tim Blake Nelson shining in particular. Miguel Arteta captures the langour of Texas without making jokes out of the characters or their lives.

While not extraordinarily intelligent, 30-year-old Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston) realizes she’s wasting away as a clerk at the Retail Rodeo somewhere in Texas. Her co-workers pass the tedium of their day in a variety of ways. Gwen (Deborah Rush) keeps herself busy with work. Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel) slings subtle insults at customers over the p.a. system. Security guard Corny (Mike White) invites Justine to his Bible study group, which she declines by stating she prefers evenings to herself. Justine’s husband Phil (John C. Reilly) and his best friend Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) are stoners who make a living as house painters. Justine is drawn to the new clerk, 22-year-old Holden Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal). Holden claims to be named after J.D. Salinger’s anti-hero and bonds with Justine over their shared hatred of the world.

Justine spurns Holden’s advances by reminding him that she’s married. He responds by quitting Retail Rodeo and writing Justine a lovesick note imploring her to meet him after work. When Gwen gets ill eating a batch of bad blackberries, Justine has to choose between accompanying her friend to the emergency room or meeting Holden at his designated rendezvous outside Chuck E. Cheese. Their intense affair is put on ice when Justine suspects that Bubba is onto them. Holden does not react well to the hiatus. Justine attempts to strengthen her marriage by taking Phil to Bible study, but changes her mind when she spots the motel manager among the saved. While Holden continues to fall apart and Bubba blackmails Justine with sex, the good girl clings to the hope that the baby she’s carrying will give her life some purpose.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11,043 users: 54% for The Good Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 71 for The Good Girl

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Melbourne, Australia.

Mary and Max (2009)
Directed by Adam Elliot
Written by Adam Elliot
Produced by Melanie Coombs
92 minutes

With its whimsical design and a sonorous screenplay, Mary and Max soars like a Dr. Seuss fable made for grownups. After winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short with Harvie Krumpet in 2004, Adam Elliot made the rounds at Disney, Pixar and Fox with pitches that fell on deaf ears. Returning to Australia, he began rereading letters by a New York pen pal he’d been corresponding with since the age of 17. Elliot felt that his long distance friend of 20 years — Jewish, atheist, a sufferer of Aspberger’s Syndrome — had all the makings of a character for his next film. Elliot spent six months storyboarding Mary and Max and another year and a half writing a script while producer Melanie Coombs raised financing. Screen Australia, Adirondack Pictures (a New York based film finance company) and Film Victoria ended up bankrolling Elliot’s first feature film at roughly $8 million AUS.

Elliot served as his own art director and designed all the characters for what took 50 crew members 57 weeks to shoot inside a Melbourne warehouse. Mary and Max was screened for the first time when it was selected to open the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, a first for a claymation feature. Elliot’s characteristic clay figures border on the grotesque, but the strength of his writing suggests an award winning graphic novel more than a movie script. Mary and Max is the anti-Shrek, brandishing abundant wit and imagination to do more than entertain kids, exploring characters who struggle to get out the door each morning. The result pushes the boundaries of animation. Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) provides the Seussian narration, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vocal transformation as Max is superlative and even the hilarious product labels in the picture are worth a rental.

In the Mount Waverly suburb of Melbourne in 1976, a Narrator (Barry Humphries) begins “Mary Dinkle’s eyes were the color of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the color of poo.” A painfully awkward child, 8-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore) counts a pet rooster named Ethel as her only friend. Her favorite activities include drinking condensed milk and watching a cartoon called The Noblets, diminutive creatures that appeal to Mary because they never lack friends. Her father Noel works in a factory attaching strings to tea bags. Her mother Vera Lorraine Dinkle consumes liberal amounts of the sherry she uses in her recipes. Meanwhile, in New York, 44-year-old Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) also watches The Noblets. A chronic overeater who worships chocolate, Max has trouble sleeping and keeping pet goldfish alive.

Mary chooses Max’s name at random from a New York City phone book and writes him, including a Cherry Rite chocolate bar. Max is “confuzzled” by human beings and reacts to Mary’s letter by having an anxiety attack. Calming down, he answers Mary’s questions — like where babies come from in America — with candor. He also details his abhorrence of crowds, bright lights, sudden noises and strong smells, admitting that New York has all of these. Basking in Max’s words, Mary adopts a pen pal. She sends him chocolate. He advises her how to handle being teased at school. Max’s tension is diagnosed as Aspberger’s Syndrome, which adult Mary (Toni Collette) hopes to eradicate by studying disorders of the mind. She falls in love with her neighbor Damien (Eric Bana) and marries, but struggles with self-worth while a continent away Max continues to fight his inner demons.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 4,594 users: 89% for Mary and Max

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

The Strangers (2008)
Directed by Bryan Bertino
Written by Bryan Bertino
Produced by Doug Davison, Roy Lee, Nathan Kahane
86 minutes (theatrical version)/ 88 minutes (unrated DVD version)

Freaks, psychos and a leprechaun have launched horror franchises, but The Strangers includes three of the best villains to come along in a while with a kitchen sink thriller that among other things actually offers a point of view. Bryan Bertino had written four scripts in his life and was working as a grip on a low budget movie. Bertino had read Helter Skelter as a kid after his father actually gave him a copy and he was inspired to write a thriller that focused not so much on killers, but the victims who never knew who was targeting them or why. In the fall of 2004, Bertino’s script The Strangers landed him a manager, who found buyers in Doug Davison and Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment. The producers partnered with Nathan Kahane, president of Mandate Pictures, who had a distribution deal with Rogue Pictures.

After other directors were considered, Bertino was offered the chance to make his feature film debut on a budget of roughly $9 million. The exterior of the ‘70s era ranch house was found in Timmonsville, South Carolina. Interiors were filmed in a warehouse in nearby Florence, where the production constructed a collapsible house they could shoot inside. While the couple in Bertino’s script is never really engaging, Liv Tyler gives a gutsy performance that’s in another league from the dead teenagers of the horror genre. When it comes to terror, the rookie filmmaker delivers with the aid of a sensational sound mix. The Strangers is not a movie to be watched alone in the dark. Finally, the masked boogeymen are a gift of imagination, conjured out of darkness with identities and motives left mysteries for the viewer to interpret.

On February 11, 2005, Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and her boyfriend James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) return from a wedding reception in the wee hours to the rustic summer home of the Hoyt family. With their relationship on the rocks after Kristen turned down James’s marriage proposal, the couple are in the throes of making up when they’re interrupted by a knock on the door. Obscured in shadow, a blonde asks: “Is Tamara home?” Turning the stranger away, James offers to pick up some cigarettes for his soon to be ex-girlfriend. Left alone, Kristen hears another knock from the same woman asking the same question. Kristen calls James on the house phone and urges him to come back, but the line goes dead. Surrounded by frightening noises, she looks out a window to find Man In the Mask (Kip Weeks) staring back at her.

Convinced that someone has been in the house, Kristen retreats to a bedroom until her boyfriend returns. From the garage, the couple observes Dollface (Gemma Ward), the strange blonde, standing in the street with a mask covering her face. James leaves the house to retrieve his cell phone out of the car, but is spooked by a third masked stranger, Pin-Up Girl (Laura Margolis). Attempting to flee in their car, Kristen & James are rear ended by a pickup truck in the driveway. James manages to locate and load the family shotgun and when Man in the Mask takes apart the door with an axe, James repels the home invasion. A friend (Glenn Howerton) drops by to check on the couple but does not live long enough to render assistance. Without knowing who their attackers are or what they want, Kristen & James try to survive the night.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 55,773 users: 48% for The Strangers

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 47 for The Strangers

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