Entry Ten

The President's Analyst: Odd 70s comedy starring James Coburn as a psychiatrist who's brought in to help unburden the president but finds himself the victim of several foreign agencies' attempts to kidnap him in order to learn what he knows. It may start off relatively straight, but soon takes a turn into the truly strange with the involvement of the bantering spies and the sinister Phone Company. It's pretty good, though probably not to everyone's taste, and features a nice performance from Coburn.

Anaconda 3: A Sci-Fi original movie displaying no originality and precious little else. A big snake, which has been drugged to find a cure for cancer, but ends up growing larger with a horn on its tail (I'm not making this up) escapes when someone shines a light on its tank and makes it angry. It escapes, and then another snake, in the relatively human form of David Hasslehoff, tracks it down. It may have some kitsch value for bad-movie fans, but it's too new and lacking in charm for me to enjoy it that way.

My Neighbor Totoro: Absolutely wonderful Japanese animation film from the masterful Hayao Miyazaki. The story is simple: a family moves to the country and the two daughters encounter the spirits of the forest. What's missing from that sentence is the charm, originality, and tenderness (though without any of Disney's sometimes overbearing sentimentality) that the director employs. It's the sort of film that kids and adults will love.

The Parallax View: Interesting, and at times very tense, mid 70s thriller starring the permanently bemused Warren Beatty as a journalist trying to piece together the mystery of an assassination of a presidential candidate. I'm not really a big fan of Beatty, so I wasn't entirely keen on watching the movie, but it eventually won me over in it's chilly depiction of an unfathomable conspiracy and an investigation that reveals only questions. I'm still unchanged on my opinion of Beatty, though.

Change of Heart: Bland melodrama from the 30s about a group of young hopefuls who go to New York to seek their fortune. Ginger Rogers co-stars, and she's the highlight, but her brassy performance is pushed to the side to make way for the interminable mooning of the main characters' and their dull romance.