I Heart Huckabees

I'm a big fan of "quirky" movies, but this one didn't tickle my funnybone. Nor did it make me pause and think. By all rights it should have, given the wonderful cast. I mean, Isabelle Huppert and Tippi Hedren in the same film -- what could be more sublime?

Akira Kurosawa's “HIGH AND LOW”

There is a scene in Kurosawa’s High and Low where police emerge from the house of a man, played by Toshiro Mifune (Red Beard), whose lost kidnapping ransom, paid to recover the son of his chauffeur, has caused his total financial ruin. Yet there he is, calmly mowing his lawn with his power mower, while his life collapses around him. He seems to be enjoying himself. Life goes on.
The theme of this movie is religious intolerance. What starts out as “forbidden love” between a small-town Hindu boy and Muslim girl becomes a horror story as they take their “forbidden love” to the big city, Bombay. There they land right in the middle of the vicious religious cultural riots of 1992-1993.

Ray

I remember a couple of years ago Diana Krall came to the DC area, headlining for Ray Charles. I didn't go to the concert, I was only interested in Krall. Paying so much to see what I considered to be a "vintage" act just didn't seem like a good idea.

Mamoru Oshii's GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE

Mamoru Oshii (Avalon) does it again, this time with a sequel to Ghost in the Shell. Some of the same characters continue. The world of the future is even more detailed and incredible than in the original. There are more philosophical musings about the nature of humanity and technology. Plus, this may be the most incredible piece of animation I have ever seen. But it is not a favorite film of mine, for a couple of reasons.

Martin Scorsese's THE AVIATOR

The Aviator is a grand and unique combination of glamour, adventure, intrigue, spectacle, humor, tragedy, and melodrama. It's about big, famous people doing things that we expect big, famous people to do. And it uses all the power that modern filmmaking technology has to offer. But its focus, ultimately, is on people and the things they do. The fact that the people inhabit (and helped create) the world of today is a definite plus, and Scorsese makes the most of this.

Monster Man

A bar full of amputee rednecks. Road trip guys chased by giant monster truck driven by faceless horror. Sexy scantily-clad hitchhiker. Giant pentagrams. Headless corpses. Fart jokes. Blood and gore up the wazoo. Road kill fantasies. This movie has it all.