7th year straight. Stuff seen on TV/video/DVD denoted with a ^ after the parentheses, shorts denoted with "sXX" for whatever number it is, repeat viewings have "/ /" around the film title. Cool? OK. Oh...and reverse chronological order, just for the convenience of those who don't want to scroll all the way down as the months pass. My, I am special.

171. (Jul. 30) Semi-Tough (1977, Michael Ritchie)^ ***1/2

Perfectly delightful; '70s Ritchie apes Altman a little (multi-tracked audio isn't his strength, but incidental one-off lines that seem to come out of nowhere are) but generally guides this double-track satire of football and EST down its own distinctive path, playing to Burt Reynolds' strengths without turning it into a lazy Burt Reynolds movie. Sexual relationships are tangled, as always, and the finale's sexual gamesmanship's dubious, but damned if it isn't fun. Will have more to say when a second viewing is, uh, slightly more attentive.

170. (Jul. 29) Charlie St. Cloud (2010, Burr Steers) **1/2

169. (Jul. 29) 17 Again (2009, Burr Steers)^ **1/2

Hard to see anything of the Steers who made Igby Goes Down in this; all that he really brought along with him was a fondness for frequent fades-to-black for punctuation. Efron's adequate, all the proselytizing for chastity is bizarre (are teen audiences really supposed to take this stuff at face value, especially when Matthew Perry-as-Efron cheers on his boy kid for landing a girl while hoping and praying his daughter comes nowhere near any guys), but you at least have to give someone credit for playing out all the potentially incestuous moments for maximum discomfort. Not really necessary in any way though.

168. (Jul. 28) Carlos (2010, Olivier Assayas) ***1/2

Review TK

167. (Jul. 27) The Call Of Cthulhu (2005, Andrew Leman)^ ***

Review (sort of) TK

s28-35. (Jul. 26) Louis Feuillade shorts (1908-13) ***

Time was I would've tried to find all the names and years individually, but I couldn't really find anything easily and refuse to go slogging through the French IMDB. 8 shorts of varying interest featuring characters like Bebe (a child actor actually not encouraged to mug and leer his way into audience's hearts), culminating in an early meta example where Bebe and company try to shoot on the street but get arrested by the police because actors and crews are known criminals. Nice to be reminded a lot of fundamentals about mainstream comedy haven't changed much of late — there's a fairly surprising, pretty straightforward implication of oral sex in one short just for good measure — and more interesting than the fustian leftovers I was expecting.

166. (Jul. 25) Going Places (1974, Bertrand Blier)^ ***

Really vile and pointless in a lot of ways: I guess Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere's schtick is supposed to at first be bracingly rude, and then we're supposed to notice that they rob but don't rape (yay?), and then I suppose they're supposed to become forces for vitality and kicking against the pricks in a stultifying society...but really all of that's a load of shit. These guys may be lively (mostly thanks to Depardieu's typically astonishing performance), but they're not witty or interesting, no matter how much poetry Depardieu quotes; they're annoying jerks just big enough to be dangerous, and they're no fun, guilty or not. On the other hand, it's kind of compelling to watch these jerk-offs unable to stop themselves from degrading people: at one point, on the run in an off-season resort town with no one else around, I wondered how long it would be before they found someone to degrade...until Depardieu simply raped Dewaere, answering my question. (Hilariously, a very young Isabelle Huppert shows up, and within ten minutes she's denouncing her entire family as bourgeois jerk-offs and having sex with them in the back seat; even back in 1974, Izzy was ready to go.) Gorgeously shot by Bruno Nuytten, and the score's nice too, equal parts Georges Delerue experimenting and Stephane Grappeli doing his thing. Irritating and vile and totally un-self-ware, but it's pretty and not boring. Toss-up.

165. (Jul. 25) Toy Story 3 (2010, Lee Unkrich) ***

First five minutes are untoppable — Andy's Western playtime rendered as CGI reality, with Woody racing to save a train full of orphans (i.e. trolls) as Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head stage their getaway in a car, only to be aided by the evil Hamm, only to have Buzz and Woody helped out by Buzz Lightyear, a totally delirious production design mash-up rendered with a straight-face — but, in fairness, they might have tried a little harder to keep the quality up all the way. Michael Sicinski's right that at certain points the film isn't even for the kids in the audience — the near-apocalyptic finale is so ponderous it's almost not redeemed by the pay-off ("THE CLAW!") — but sometimes it's not even a comedy for either part of the audience. The extended eulogy finale makes the end fairly interminable — a send-off for every toy? Really? — but...yeah, a lot of the jokes have more energy than wit. Always nice to see the gang, but it's time for them to stop coming around.

164. (Jul. 23) Xica da Silva (1976, Carlos Diegues) ***

Enjoyable enough sex comedy — broad, goofy, with evident joy taken in the childish over-acting and bright colors, plus orgasms that sound like someone's having their leg amputated — with a post-colonial approach and social context I don't really understand at all beside the basics. Painless, but I don't really know what it's about besides the obvious (i.e. a slave using her sexual wiles to enslave her ostensible master while still unable to gain any autonomy in her own person), which isn't all that interesting.

163. (Jul. 22) The Dawn Patrol (1930, Howard Hawks) ***

Extremely stiff in the way that a lot of 1930 early sound films are, and rarely prototypically "Hawksian" — the scene where the shot-down German pilot, now drinking cheerfully with his Allied captors, is delighted to meet the man he shot down, thought dead a few minutes ago, is an anomaly — but certainly representative of a certain strain of World War I fatalism that manages to rue the loss of life and indict the high command without having anyone on-screen have to take actual responsibility. Plane stunts are negligible, but the atmosphere lulls you into a hypnotic state after a while.

162. (Jul. 21) The Killer Inside Me (2010, Michael Winterbottom) ***

Hadn't checked in with Winterbottom since Nine Songs, and I still think he's kind of hopeless: at one point during a perfectly standard two-shot of two people talking (think it's at Jessica Alba's house, but it might be at the jail), he inexplicably cuts to the kind of handheld, lurking-behind-the-window shot that normally conveys a serial killer watching from afar — but Winterbottom isn't conveying anything with that shot, it's just there. Single-handedly made worth watching by the remarkable Casey Affleck: initially hard to believe he's capable of being so brutal, soft-spoken as he is, but totally hypnotic and finally convincing. Existential trappings a bit much — all that opera! — but the production design's nice.

161. (Jul. 20) The Circus (1928, Charles Chaplin) ***1/2

The Tramp in a less precious mode: his initial attitude towards a waif trying to get his food isn't benevolent kindness or lovestruck submissiveness, but instead almost belting her one. The man needs his food, and he's all the more appealing for it; descends into pathos at the end, but since it didn't start there it feels earned. Stunts at least convey the illusion of danger (without the heart-pounding quality of some Keaton/Lloyd), plus surprising brutality in the father-daughter relationship that's taken as is rather than dragged out into an endless opportunity for Chaplin to ennoble himself. Guess silent Chaplin's really where it might be for me; first time I didn't have to grit my teeth to get through a real Tramp entertainment.

s27. (Jul. 20) The Idle Class (1922, Charles Chaplin) ***1/2

Guess I'd somehow never seen silent Chaplin before, and this works a lot better for me because of a) the unexpected fits of violence on the golf course, which are hilarious and inexplicable as opposed to saccharine b) the coldness of Chaplin's aristocrat. Best gag: after reading letter from his wife saying she won't return until he quits drinking, he's seen from the back, his shoulders and back shaking spasmodically in what look like ridiculously over-the-top, protracted sobbing. Then he turns around and he's just using the cocktail shaker.

160. (Jul. 19) The Rookie (1990, Clint Eastwood) ***

A stupid, ridiculous movie, to be sure — and even here, in the middle of the biggest explosions ever, cars flying out of garages and Charlie Sheen burning a bar down (!), it's still indifferently paced, and somehow inappropriately visually dark. Hilarious nonetheless; Eastwood's character is a warm-up for Gran Torino's Walt Kowalski, gleefully fucking with people in the most offensive way possible before getting raped (!) by Sonia Braga. Also featuring the hilariously odd dialogue stylings of one Pepe Serna, who's both unconvincing at the most basic lines and freakishly bellicose (at one point screaming into the camera for no apparent reason "This isn't a job, it's a fucking adventure!") — and did I mention Sheen burns down the bar after spitting some alcohol at his lighter like a circus freak? Indelible in its own special way.

159. (Jul. 19) Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood) ***

Perhaps watching this in the context of four Eastwood movies in two weeks was a mistake, because at this point I just couldn't pay attention to anything but Eastwood's exceptionally languorous (again!) staging (not helped one bit by the opening echoes of The Outlaw Josey Wales). Seems to be champing a little hard at the revisionist bit — was it really people saying stuff like "cunny" on one side and grown men wetting themselves at the threat of gunplay on the other, or is that just being needlessly unpleasant in the opposite direction? — and only Gene Hackman really keeps you guessing. Highlights here and there, of course, but I still don't understand how this (his best movie, by all accounts) is just so indifferently slapped together. Maybe it's just a mental block...

158. (Jul. 14) The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1964, Anthony Mann) ***

Spent a lot of the running time wondering how a should-be stodgy '60s super-production that was an anachronism pretty much as soon as it was released is still infinitely livelier than Gladiator, Christopher Plummer's expert Commodus (he chews less scenery than Joaquin Phoenix and generally is far more nuanced than he needs to be for someone acting opposite Stephen Boyd) and all. Plus there's a meta-chariot chase (Boyd at the wheels again, only as the good guy this time) that's as fast and breathless as, say, the last Indiana Jones. Never boring, and Mann's ideas about societal entropy are kept from reaching the usual hysterical heights by the sheer mechanics of the production; the scale of the extras remains Soviet-army staggering, transforming mere bodies into actual compositional elements as abstract as any columns. A blast despite the usual genre stupidity.