It's time for my 7-year annual blog post! The last movie that made me think.... hmmm......Power of the Dog?

What happened? I was playing bridge and my blog fell on me.

It pains me to admit the last film that made me think was Under The Skin (2013). What did it make me think about? (Forgive me for I have not read the book). The movie is a puzzle - i.e. why is this happening? Who does it benefit? A few minor things are cleared up in the third act.

What it made me think about was Stanislaw Lem's novel His Master's Voice

(Metacritic rating: 78)

In my dream, I was part of a group involved in life or death escape from authorities. Having executed strenuous and painful athletic feats in caves, on water, ..., we had become very fit and rugged, but it was still almost certain we would be apprehended. It turned out two of our group were great young hockey players, the sons of billionaire founder/CEOs of rival companies. After an endless chase through a maze in Boston, we fled to New Hampshire. Finally, I was able to return to my apartment near Fenway Park. I realized I had left my kitten alone for several days and was worried for its health. When I let myself into the suite of rooms, people were there looking at an enormous floor jigsaw puzzle I had been working on before leaving town. It featured a photograph that held significance in the big company rivalry. I realized I was under scrutiny, maybe even in danger, because of inside information I possessed connected with the photograph. New construction by one of the two companies had surrounded my aparment building with a stark structure, controversial for its dark, forbidding architecture. One of the hockey players, knowing his fate might be in my hands, but remaining fiercely honest, quietly admitted the building was a bad thing. The hundreds of people, including myself, were being served a neighborhood feast, so we sat down on rickety rented bridge chairs. I went for a walk around the block and into an underground shopping mall. I was able to speak several foreign languages with proprietors of the shops.

Antichrist (2009)

Something as unique as this is always a bonus. Writer/director Lars von Trier's film gives a slightly more scrutable David Lynch experience. See it in the theater or on a plasma screen (which I don't have because the buggers eat ridiculous amounts of power. )

Antichrist's intellectualism is authentic, not postmodern. I therefore expected the themes to travel along familiar lines, being wise to the tired stumblings of both enlightenment rationalism and Adorno's anti-everything. But it's not even about that.

Stupid that this is being shown as a Halloween movie on cable.

(Metacritic rating: 48)

Nothing Is Private (2007)

A configuration of minor flaws here - in casting, writing, direction, photography, editing - add up to something that is the opposite of enjoyable. It's as if the man or woman who makes it a movie was out sick.

Hint to filmmakers: with source material that is good but unavoidably politically incorrect - the commercial title was Towelhead, the film's reechoing epithet - you must not freakshow the characters. They can't be sometimes real and sometimes cardboard cutout.

(Metacritic rating: 57)

Amores perros (2000)

I believe the title must translate as When Terrible Things Happen To Terrible People. It's a Dogme-esque film set in "Iberian America." Karma: former college professor, 20 years before, had dropped out, leaving wife and child, to become a guerilla. Now living outside society but in it, he saves a nearly dead fight dog. But while the man was away from his hovel, the recovered canine has killed or maimed most of the other dogs he cares for. The vicious dog represents violent radicalism which ideological belief allows to flourish - with devastating results.

(Metacritic rating: 83)

You Don't Mess With The Zohan (2008)

The hommus is plentiful as the Middle East meets the Lower East Side in Adam Sandler's successful goof on terrorism. The laughs are split between body-fluid situations and satire of the low-brow, 70's-ish preferences of Israelis and Arabs in America (apparently they all LOVE Mariah Carey). The latter category is largely lost on audiences here, but don't let your quiet fellow theater-goers get you down.

John Turturro hasn't been this ethnically funny since The Big Lebowski (1998).

(Metacritic rating: 54)