The "Cowboy Bebop" anime series, which chronicles the various adventures of two bounty hunters in the space-age future, has been heralded as a postmodern classic. If "postmodern" here means something like intertwining the most disparate cultural and conceptual elements into a single storyline, then this is definitely an apt description. If you have never seen a fight between two laser-shooting spaceships set to free jazz, a conversation about policing terrorism that takes place during the screening of an old Western movie, or bounty hunters who allude to Charlie Parker and Goethe in the same sentence, then this is the series for you. The movie version is a bit overlong, but still makes for a good introduction.

7/10

I first saw this when it came out in the theaters when I was 18. I liked its style a lot, but even then I had some trouble with its overall lack of substance.

I feel more or less the same 8 years later. Basically the movie poses some challenging philosophical questions--mainly, what makes us human?--but then makes the mistake of trying to answer them. The answers in this case turn out to be as predictable and unprovocative as they come.

Usually the more overtly philosophical a movie is, the less its overall philosophical worth. Think of "The Matrix" (crap) or "Waking Life" (even worse). Dark City is better than both of these, but in the end it should have relied more on its medium and less on its message.

5/10

There's a scene in this movie, about an hour in. The alcoholic would-be writer returns to his apartment, which he trashed earlier looking for a stashed bottle of rye. He has just come from a nightclub where he was caught stealing a woman's purse to pay his bar tab and tossed out. He collapses down on his bed, beaten and humiliated. He looks up and, there in the translucent cover of the ceiling light, sees his missing treasure. A devilish gleam enters his eyes: Another bottle of rye! A new life!

8/10

Usually I find so-called "movies about movies" too annoyingly self-referential to be worth much. But Camera Buff avoids this because the movie story it tells is interesting enough in its own right. In Communist Poland a guy who works at a factory buys a small movie camera to film his newborn baby. When the factory owner finds out, he asks him to make a film of an upcoming visit by party bosses to the factory. The guy does so, interspersing weird shots of pigeons at the window and such, and to everyone's surprise the film wins a prize at an independent film festival. So the guy becomes more and more interested in making films, aiming at capturing the truth about his surroundings at all expense--but then he gradually learns that this task is not as simple as it appears. The factory boss in particular turns out to be not at all what he seems.

This is Kieslowski's first film, and I can't remember enjoying any of his other films so much as this one.

8/10

"I'm sure he was good, Ruby. But this obsession he seems to have for guns . . ."

Run-of-the-mill film noir. The plot is pretty lame (my wife and I laughed out loud at a couple of points, including the above line) and the moral is not so subtle (originally it was titled "Deadly is the Female").

But it is redeemed by a couple of points. One of them is the actor John Dall, who also played the Nietzschean villain in Hitchcock's "Rope." He has an interesting and unusually expressive face, and is starting to become one of my favorite actors of the period. Another is that Lewis shoots a couple of the robbery and escape scenes from the back seat of the getaway car, which makes for some white-knuckled viewing.

6/10