Dan1863Sickles

It starts slow, like an unfunny low-budget version of WALK HARD. Just saying "The wrong kid died, Dewey Cox" delivers more laughs than all the unfunny yelling and punching at the family table.

But it gets better. Evan Rachel Wood is enchanting as Madonna. It's screamingly funny how she leans into all the most sexist stereotypes about powerful, successful women, and still makes you love the character anyway. Madonna is ruthless, ambitious, manipulative, and dishonest. Yet you can't help enjoying her spunk and zest for life. And somehow just having her onscreen makes Al come to life more as a very average guy who really buys into his own bigger than life myth. There's a sight gag about Louis XIV that Dewey Cox could never have dreamed up!

The funny thing about Weird Al is that while I don't really enjoy his parodies I genuinely admire his taste. When he's trying out for his first band, he auditions by singing "Beat On The Brat" by the Ramones. And on some level it's not a joke. No one is paying him to plug the Ramones. He really loves that kind of music. And again, when he's drunk on stage, he does an homage to Jim Morrison that isn't especially funny but reads as completely sincere.

Even the Pablo Escobar scenes were great. It's like Weird Al is saying, "hey, I hated BLOW too. I wish I could have made that movie. I would have cleaned that guy's clock!" In the end the whole thing works out okay, even if WALK HARD had more epic grandeur and better original music.

Great documentary about the author of The Maltese Falcon and dozens of other great detective novels. Dashiell Hammett comes to life as a talented author who dared to write about the ugly side of American cities and American crime. David Strathairn and Katherine Turner do an amazing job of narrating the story and bringing the most dramatic passages of his greatest works to life.

The great mystery of Hammett is not how he got the ideas for his detective stories. He really was a Pinkerton detective! But what's never explained is why he stopped writing completely in the mid 1930's, and why he did nothing but drink and die slowly for the next twenty years.

Funny also that we hear nothing at all about his childhood in Baltimore. What happened to him there? What did he see?

Positively the worst movie ever made about a public librarian. Goofy characters, ghastly story, cold and manipulative women, moronic men, sex without any kind of excitement. PALMETTO and WILD THINGS came out in the Nineties, and at the time people said those movies were bad rip-offs of classic film noir.

But those two movies were DOUBLE INDEMNITY compared to this mess.

I like Diane Kruger. She was brilliant in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. She was lovely in TROY. Why on earth would she ever agree to this? Her character is so lifeless, boring, empty, and at the same time needy and cruel. Was this some lost clause in the Treaty of Versaille?

ARTICLE 15: Once every 50 years a stunning German actress must come to American and be humiliated by a no-name director and make a movie where she is stupid and evil and does all the stupid things people laugh at Germans for doing. Except for eating sauerkraut and drinking beer!