Monkey Movie Review Round Up

Inside Man is Spike Lee's latest film. It's a slick, well written and well directed heist movie. The performances by Denzel Washington, Willem Dafoe, and Clive Owen are all very good. I liked most all of this movie with one exception, and her name is Jodie Foster. I didn't buy her as the menacing mastermind who gets things done by intimidation and what not, in fact her whole sub plot was laughable. Maybe in some alternate universe Jodie Foster can brow beat people and scare them into to doing her bidding and bending others to her iron will but it sure as hell ain't going to happen in this universe. She didn't strike a single chord of fear in me, although she did make me giggle a few times when she tried to be all bad ass and shit. I'm praying she won't be in the sequel.

I can't recommend this one due to Jodie Foster's stunningly unbelievable performance.

Death at a Funeral is one of those very droll, very British comedies that Anglophiles like me usually love. This one had it moments and over all it's worth seeing once but it's not knee slapping funny. The extras on the DVD are so slim they're non existent, they only offer two commentary tracks and a gag reel that is uncomfortable to watch at times. If you like dry British films then this one is right up your alley.

Of the three feature length films I've seen in the past few weeks I liked this documentary the best. It's about an influential movie channel that ran on some southern California cable stations in the late 1970's through the late 1980's.

Channel Z was famous for running unheralded, uncut, international, American, and cult films commercial free. The man who chose the movies that ran on Channel Z was a film fanatic named Jerry Harvey. Harvey championed avant garde, foreign, and otherwise overlooked films and he ran them as they were intended to be seen, in their full uncut glory. He brought such films as Overlord, Fitzcarraldo, Das Boot, 1900, Once Upon a Time in America, and many others to the attention of his viewers. He also showed many early and under appreciated films by directors such as Henry Jaglom, Robert Altman, Paul Verhoven, and many others on his channel. What Harvey did was nothing less than bring world cinema at to the USA and through his championing of under appreciated films he revived the careers of many a director.

But Harvey suffered with mental illness through his life and finally his dark side got the best of him. One night in the late 80's when it looked like his beloved Channel Z was going to go off the air, he shot and killed his wife and then he turned his gun on himself and he blew his brains out. Although he was young when he died, he was 39, his impact lives on to this day. With out Channel Z many of the films we know as masterpieces today would never have come to our attention.

Speaking as a film buff, if I had known in the early 9180's there was such a thing as Channel Z my life would have been very different because instead of going to college I would have went out to LA and I would have done everything in my power to get a job with Jerry Harvey. I grew up loving movies and when I began to find out about the world of film outside of the films of Hollywood I was more movie crazy than before. If I had known that one could have made a living watching great films and then showing them on TV I would have been there in a heart beat. I would have slept in the Channel Z offices and worked for next to nothing just to have been around that scene.

This documentary is kind of depressing given how Harvey ended his life, but in another way it's very life affirming when one considers that Harvey's work is still helping shape cinema today. I recommend this one highly, especially because you will learn a lot about world and overlooked cinema.