BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE starts off as if a stoned hippie with an 8mm cam began to film cinema verite and did not wish to infringe on the rights of an equally stoned cast to get the scene right in the first take. Somewhere in this turgid bloated mess of a psychodrama are some unpleasant truths about the way married couples confront personal and sexual disconnections, but this relevant set of subtexts is hidden under an annoying coating of a 60s mentality of free love, beads, primal scream therapy, and groupsex, all of which date what otherwise have been some eternal truisms.

Robert Culp is Bob, a 40 something successful businessman who is less a fully-fleshed individual than a stereotyped hippie weekend wannabe who wants the freedom to have affairs but is unwilling to give his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) the same right. Bob is not just a man in search of himself. He comes across as an annoying pest who likes to think of himself as a new age guru who believes that he personifies the adage of Do Your Own Thing. Naturally, anyone who dares to show conventional middle class moral objections to his philandering is dismissed as a fuddy duddy out of touch with his own feelings. Carol is even less of a believable person as she skates through life with her feet barely touching the moral ground of life. Director Paul Mazursky allows the viewer to get an idea of how and why Bob and Carol think and act. At the start of the film, they attend a group interaction session led by a therapist who exhorts his patients to engage in some questionable methods: they scream, beat pillows, gawk about the room, and stare into one another's eyes as if to connect on a visual level.

Ted (Eliot Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) are more open with their vulnerabilities, and hence engage us more. Both are disgusted at first with the open fooling around of Bob and Carol. Ted wants more frequent sex with Alice but does not know how to handle her rejection of him. Despite his geekiness, Ted comes across as a reasonably moral man whose own limits are soon to be tested first by a wife whose burgeoning sexuality snaps to attention then later by his own crumbling wall of marital fidelity.

The second half of the film is more interesting than that of the first. The cloying irritability that dominates the first half is replaced by several humorous, yet revealing vignettes that culminate with all four in bed and not knowing or daring what to do. The hesitant expressions on their faces suggest that morality is not a blanket to be donned or doffed at will. BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE is a potent, if misguided moral fairy tale that warns us that the freedom to be superficially open may in fact be nothing more than a license to hide behind that blanket of openness.

When I first read Ann Coulter's TREASON, I was already in agreement with the key points of her theory: namely, the left wing liberal democratic party had for decades been the ruination of this country. I had already read her earlier work, SLANDER, in which she had argued that the left has long maligned those concepts that the right cherishes: guns, anti-abortion, and a hawkish national security. What I got out of her TREASON was what should have been a clear message of conservatism was instead garbled by an excessive sarcasm to the extent that many a reader would be more likely to examine the messenger rather than the message.

Coulter insists on the following: Alger Hiss was a communist; the NEW YORK TIMES would defend relentlessly to the death the right of any communist to hold high political office; Joe McCarthy was a true American who sought only to warn America of its 'hidden' communists; every democratic President since FDR has been hailed as the reason for the collapse of the Soviet state; Reagan deserves none of the credit for that collapse; the liberal left desires nothing more than to embrace all things anti-American (especially the right not to defend our borders) and carp against traditional World World II virtues as flag waving and buying liberty bonds; and noting that the loudest critics of President Bush are celebrity actors who are fond of traveling to the homelands of despots and happily praise the life styles of those who live under their heavy-handed rule.

Most conservative Americans would agree to most of the above, as do I, but I like to think that well-reasoned argument and an aversion to mudslinging ought to be enough to make one's point. Bernard Goldberg, who says much the same in BIAS and ARROGANCE, establishes a solid crest of logic is his dispassionate dissection of how the left-dominated media distorts the news. By the time, I reached Coulter's conclusion that "The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason," I had already been convinced before I even opened her book. I simply could not be objective enough to guarantee that a non-believer would have reached a similar conclusion.

Sometimes an independent film company succeeds in a film despite its normal handicap of a shoestring budget. In the case of THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN director Jack Pollexfen uses the eye twitching talents of Lon Chaney Jr to create a weird period piece that both harkens back to the early career of Chaney who used to thrive on such off beaten roles and looks forward to the modern day Terminator series that features Arnold Schwarzenegger in a similar role as the bullet proof protagonist. Added to this was Pollexfen's use of a Dragnet-style narrator using co-star Max Showalter, who as Detective Dick Chasen, sounds remarkably like Jack Webb as Sgt Joe Friday. Usually, the graininess of a cheapo like this one works against the viewer's getting involved in the action, but in this case, Chaney's twitching eyes (whenever he gets angry--in nearly every third scene) become a symbol of an uprooted emotion of anger that is dramatically emphasized by numerous scenes of Chaney simply walking the streets,looking for his former cohorts in crime who betrayed him for $600,000. Chaney is 'Butcher' Benton, a career criminal who unwisely links up with a sleazy lawyer and two other lowlifes to steal money. They offer Benton to the police. But before Benton is executed, he vows revenge. Up to this point, this is a straight crime drama. Director Pollexfen quickly switches gears to the realm of science fiction by having Butcher's corpse wind up in the hands of two of television's most widely known second bananas, Robert Shayne (from Superman's Inspector Henderson), who plays mad scientist Professor Bradshaw and Joe Flynn (from McHale's Navy Captain Binghampton), as his geeky assistant. This pair revives Butcher by zapping him with 270,000 volts of electricity. An unexpected benefit is that all that juice has made his skin bullet proof and rendered him mute. For most of the picture, Benton prowls the streets of Los Angeles, looking like any other disheveled ex-con, and killing those who betrayed him.

It is too easy to dismiss THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN as just yet another example of a last attempt of an out-of-style actor to grab one more paycheck. Chaney rarely was allowed to speak at length in any of his films, but when he was as in HIGH NOON or OF MICE AND MEN, Chaney possessed the ability to make you feel his pain that he guarded under his massive frame. Here, there are only verbal hints of his inner turmoil. He tries to convey his anger, and in a few scenes he succeeds. When he meets with his former girlfiend, Eva (Marian Carr), his muteness does not allow him to verbalize. He takes a sharp scissors and blunts the tip against his open palm, with the camera focusing more on his face than his hand, and the audience can see that the Butcher is silently announcing his intentions of revenge. There are enough scenes like this one to elevate THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN from the sewers of culluoid bottom feeding to the next higher level where viewers can overlook its obvious shortcomings and be reminded once again that wilted talent can still stand out in a world of dreck.

The image of the western gunfighter has been indelibly etched by the likes of John Wayne in the forties and Clint Eastwood in the sixties as a supremely confident and capable shootist. It is rare for Hollywood to buck this trend but in THE FASTEST GUN ALIVE director Robert Rouse peels away the layers that all too often separate celluloid fiction from brute fact. Glen Ford is George Temple, a one time fast draw expert who has spent years trying to live down a wall of self-imposed isolation that he feels would be needed each time another quick draw wannabe wants to put him to the test. He has learned to camouflage his unwanted skill over the years. He has married an understanding woman (Jeanne Crain), who suffers in silence along with him each time he has to struggle to contain the itch to show off a talent that she knows will eventually kill him. The first half of this superb film is a study in how one man chooses to live a life to which he is clearly unsuited. He runs a small store in a small town surrounded by folk who have no idea who or what he is. The focus is on character development, no small feat in the gunfighter genre. In the next town, a bank robbery led by Broderick Crawford yanks Temple out of his comfortable pseudo-existence. Crawford hears of Temple's speedy draw and pauses in his escape from a posse to challenge Temple in a showdown. It is almost beside the point that any desperado would chance getting caught by the law merely to add a notch to his gun. From the first reel to the last, both Temple and the bank robber are on tracks that do not permit any deviation. In an odd sort of way, both men share more than speed with a pistol. Each is driven by the gun: Crawford, to venerate it, and Temple to negate it. The climactic showdown is the cracklingly effective sort of western legend that has been all too often obscured by the fake glories of the movie cowboy. Glen Ford is a movie cowboy here too, but he makes you think that just maybe this is the way that shootouts at high noon must have been like. This gem is rarely seen except on cable. Catch it and see how a small part of the west was won.

It is surprising that there are as few classic anti-war movies as there are. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is one of them. What is even more surprising is that is was filmed in 1929 when Hollywood was just making the switch from silent to talking films. Director Lewis Milestone adapted the novel by Erich Maria Remarque and lost none of the power of the ghastly images on the printed page. What he filmed has not been topped in the seven decades since then. You will not find any reference to war that has glory attached to it, except perhaps to denigrate glory as a Hollywood adjunct to celluloid combat. There is no call, John Wayne or Stallone-like, to present killing as a means to an end. Here, mass killing and the horror of trench warfare strip away the illusion that war somehow glorifies those who are caught up in it. At the start of the movie, Lew Ayres is German college student Baumer, who one day while in class, gets suckered into the maw of war by his college teacher who regales his class with stirring tales of heroism set amidst some equally stirring martial music. Student Baumer quickly becomes Private Baumer. At their training depot, Baumer and his comrades still think war is simply another side of life. Their collective view of war is not unlike the view that Henry Fleming had at the start of Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Baumer soon finds out that with the first shots of war, the reality mugs the image. What director Milestone succeeds in doing has never been equalled. These new German recruits open the film as happy, confident and goodlooking. Quickly, they learn that war devolves them into blundering atavisms. Not only do they act ignobly and irrationally under stress, but they seem to get uglier as the picture progresses. This ugliness is not simply the result of missing a few baths or shaves, but almost as if they were subject to a regression that swoops tham back to their primeval ancestors. The effect on the audience is startling as it is forced to acknowledge that war destroys both the inner and outer man.

Ayres, of course, carries the movie as he alone seems to maintain his precious sense that his humanity cannot be frittered away even if his sanity might. The technology of the time, while quite crude by today's standards, is still stunningly effective in assaulting the eyes and ears of the audience in a crunching cacophany of disorienting images. There is a series of montages of French soldiers attacking entrenched German trenches and getting slaughtered by massed machine gun fire, and then incredibly enough, the Germans counterattack to meet the same fate. By the time the armistice is announced, the "all quiet" of the title, both Baumer, his comrades, and the audience have been stripped of their flimsy illusions that war has some end other than its cessation. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT serves to remind each new generation that the maw of war will gobble up warm bodies even more rapaciously than it will those illusions that led those bodies into that maw in the first place.

When director William Dieterle transformed Victor Hugo's THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME to fit the big screen, he succeeded in capturing the power and sweep of an age that was characterized by individual examples of humanity lost in a sea of inhumanity. Much has been said about the universality of the Beauty and the Beast theme that has marked many past and future books, movies, and television series. Here, Dieterle makes use of the considerable talents of Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, Maureen O'Hara as Esmeralda and Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Frollo, all of whom play out their lives against a brute Parisian government that seemed determined to crush any opposition. One of the less acknowledged aspects of the Beauty versus Beast contrast is the theme that the beauty of Esmeralda and the beastiness of Quasimodo are not limited to those two alone. The very system that wrecks the lives of the poverty-stricken populace puts on a facade of saintliness that makes its inner core of corrupt ugliness all the more stark.

O'Hara's Esmeralda is sweetness personified. She is a lovely gypsy woman who unhappily catches the eye of a lecherous Chief Prosecutor, sanctimoniously played by Hardwicke, who commits a murder only to frame Esmeralda, who has rejected his advances. Hardwicke plays the Chief Prosecutor in a way that brings to mind every corrupt official who has ever been caught with his hand in the till. He sees nothing wrong with using the full weight of his office to humiliate and condemn a woman who has done nothing to deserve this. Enter Quasimodo, a hunchbacked and deaf bell ringer whose appearance frightens others to the same extent that Esmeralda's captivates these same others. Early on, she takes pity on him by giving him water after a savage lashing. Later, he shows that his inner being is far more decent and sensitive than the hypocrites that cry out for his blood. The trial that condemns Esmeralda as a murderous witch says a great deal more about the repressed ugliness of the judges even as they mouth pious and empty phrases that can only caricature but not capture the spirit of their criminal justice system, which in any event, stacks the deck against anyone whom the church accuses of misdeeds. Frollo's perfect diction,his sonorous phrasing, and his impressive robes linger in the audience's mind as a truly terrifying symbol of evil. The people of Paris themselves have two faces as well. As Quasimodo is being whipped, nearly every voice is raised against him. The mob of Paris was as unthinking then as when, centuries later, Madame Guillotine lopped off countless heads during the French Revolution. Yet, these same Parisians could storm a church where they mistakenly believed the King's soldiers were headed to arrest Esmeralda and take her for hanging. The theme of outer appearances hiding its inner opposites makes an unexpected appearance when Quasimodo intervenes and kills many of these same Parisians who want only to save Esmeralda from the King's soldiers who have been given new orders to save her. The final scenes of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME are full of unforgettable savageries made even more unforgettable by their lack of necessity. Quasimodo laughs maniacally as he repells the church door crashing mob. At the end, only Esmeralda finds a measure of closure as she is reunited with her lover. But for Quasimodo, all he has is the certainty that Esmeralda is safe from the rampaging mob, the lecherous criminal justice system, and an uncaring royal army. Quasimodo's closing line as he addresses the stone gargoyles atop the bells of his beloved church--"Why can't my heart be as stony as thee"--well evokes the paradox that often virtue comes with a high price tag. For good-hearted men--even human gargoyles like him, Quasimodo emerges as a man whose humanity dwarfs all those around him.

The mark of a special effects driven film that has the unmistakable cachet of being memorable is a function both of how often it is viewed after its original release and whether it has elements other than special effects going for it. These two marks are related in that long term critical and popular acclaim depend on their interaction. With THE MATRIX RELOADED, the brother directors Wachowski try to build on the short term success of its prequel THE MATRIX. In this latter film, they had reasonable success in postulating a world that was a simulation of its sleeping humans who were cared for by their machine masters. This interesting philosophical underpinning combined with some startling special effects stamped THE MATRIX as a good, but not quite very good science fiction movie. In this Part II, the brothers Wachowski flirt with, rather than delve into, the tension inherent in a world that was not all it seemed to be and a world fought over by unsleeping humans and attacking machine squid creatures. When the very basis of the film's aesthetic core is hidden murkily by frequent glimpses of these tentacled devices that do little more than flop around on command, then what remains is a motivation that has nowhere to go. On a stylistic level, this aimlessness of drive is matched by an equally aimless series of montages that feature gravity-defying leaps, elaborate martial arts bouts with no one getting hurt, and a freeway chase that looks more like computer-enhanced car crashes than a filmed set piece with real stunt drivers racing up and down in their equally real automobiles. With all these unintegrated special effects, the result is to place the viewer in the uncomfortable position of trying to care about characters who seem fated never to suffer actual harm. Even when co-star Carrie Moss, who as Trinity, gets shot by a slug that in other scenes no one had trouble dodging, her fate is as lackluster as that of the titular hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves. Reeves plays Neo as some impossible combination of Superman and Jesus Christ. Yet, his flying and resurrection abilities do not add up to a film populated by believable characters. Not for one second in any of the film's interminable fight sequences did I believe that Reeves was in any mortal danger. What this second in a projected trilogy boils down to is a film that is fun to watch, but as the viewer approaches mid-point, he begins to hope for something other than special effects to hook onto. The early returns on the third movie, MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, suggests that the Wachowski brothers are continuing the same dreary route that began with the second half of THE MATRIX.

There is a western stereotype that western men have about Asian women. This stereotype cuts across all geographical bounds and zeros in on the mythical, but probably non-existent image of the Asian woman as demure, sexually accomodating, and anti-feminist. In ASIAN LADIES, Owe Ommer has a pictorial on Asian women that feeds into this fantasy. The pictures are erotic, but decidedly not pornographic. They show good-looking Asian women that run the ethnic gamut from Chinese to Korean to Japanese. What this Asian spectrum reveals relates more to exposing the collective psyches of the assumed western reader than it does to the subjects themselves. As I flipped through the pages, I saw many sad-faced ladies who did not seem to know why they were chosen to be included. Any smiles they showed seemed to be nervous ones. Clearly, they were not full of the bouncy joy of life expressions that mark Playboy bunnies. So why would any western male buy this book? Perhaps he, as did I, simply may want to see a pictorial on lovely Asian women who fit nicely into the prepackaged ethnic slots that contain stereotyped images of ladies who needed a paycheck more than they did integity.

In the America of ATLAS SHRUGGED, Ayn Rand portrays a society that is as starkly one-dimensional as any that has been penned. To her, people, institutions, economic systems, and carefully worked out values are purposefully depicted as showing a society designed to highlight a personal ethos that places a premium on rugged individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, guided selfishness, personal happiness, and an unwavering contempt for anyone who opposes her core beliefs. If Rand's heroes personify her often repeated beliefs that American prosperity rests on the mythical shoulders of Atlas, then it is money that functions as the steroids of her philosophical body building. What complicates the extent to which the acquisition and possession of money separates her heroes from her villains is the troublesome issue as to the classification of the novel. Is ATLAS SHRUGGED a novel wrapped around a philosophy or is it the reverse? This is no small matter, since the reader's perception of and reaction to it is the means by which that reader can assess exactly how money shapes the reader's sense of Rand's entire mode of thought.

Not all readers are willing to slog through the more than a thousand pages of prose that describe both hero and villain in terms not found outside comic books. Unless readers make a determined effort to separate their innate sense of their own realism from the novel's heavy-handed use of allegorical and metaphorical stick-figures, then the relevant question of the function of money is made moot. As I was reading ATLAS SHRUGGED, I had to continually remind myself not to straddle this metaphysical fence. I assumed that Rand did not intend her readers to see her titular hero John Galt as a real life fully-fleshed man, but she far more likely intended Galt as an absolute symbol of individualism that ordinary humans could grope for, but never quite grasp. Yet, I saw that for Rand, it was crucial that her readers try for betterment even if they failed in the attempt.

The heroes and villains of ATLAS SHRUGGED both value money, but it is not the physical properties of the money that distinguish the hero from the villain, but rather in how and for what purpose that money was acquired. Generally, to qualify as a Randian hero, that character has to understand that there is no mystical world beyond this one and that pure reason is the means to apprehend it. Individuals have to be free from the taint of government handout or stifling restriction. Further, the pursuit of personal happiness is mutually exclusive with both sacrifice and altruism for others. The heroes--John Galt, Ragnar Danneskjold, Hank Rearden, and Dagny Taggart--all typify to one extent or another this credo. The villains--Robert Stadler, Floyd Ferris, Wesley Mouch, and James Taggart--are the heroes' antithesis.

The heroes of ATLAS SHRUGGED tend to view wealth as that which was earned solely by the ability and effort of the earner. If that wealth were stolen, leached, or mooched, then these heroes would refuse to accept it as legitimately earned. Ragnar Danneskjold is one such hero who meets Hank Rearden to tell him that he wishes to return some gold that he had pirated earlier and now seeks to return it to its original owner. In effect, Danneskjold wishes to be a 'reverse Robin Hood.' The surprising part is that Rand makes clear her antipathy toward altruism and self-sacrifice toward others whom Rand sees as parasites sucking the vitality out of her genuine heroes. When Danneskjold says that he wishes to kill a man long dead (Robin Hood), he emphasizes that the world is better off with more of the powerful and vital mighty and fewer of the parasitic masses that occupy the rest of the planet.

The mysterious John Galt is the central figure of the book. It is his name which is bandied about in the often asked: 'Who is John Galt?' It is his elusive philosophy which permeates throughout. And it falls to him to speak Rand's sixty page closing screed about the need for society to have a rugged individual running things. This long and pontificating speech is the rhetorical symbol for the novel itself: rambling, excessive, pedantic, and more than a bit boring. The proper function of money for the Right Thinking Man is the same as for anything else of that man. Honest clear thinking, whether it results in financial profit, (a certainty for Rand) is to be favored over taking or leaching the hard-won results of the efforts of that Right Thinking Man. At the end of his long speech, Galt is offered the chance to be the absolute dictator of the world--provided that his decisions meet the approval of the very parasites who stole his wealth and power in the first place. When Rand closes the novel with, 'He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar,' she notes that for Galt and through her, both value the free and unfettered symbol of the dollar over the actual and misused power of it. Clearly, then, the form and function of money in ATLAS SHRUGGED is itself a function of whether one sees the work as a novelized philosophy or a philosophized novel.

Life was hard and times were no joke in the economically blighted cities and wind-blasted rural areas that marked a Depression era America. Whatever joy most Americans grasped for seemed to be just beyond their collective reaches. In OF MICE AND MEN John Steinbeck portrays a people who are just as blighted as the land on which they trod. Lennie Small and George Milton are two migrants who are forced to wander the midwest in search of the American Dream, which, to them, meant a place of their own. Each recognizes that this dream will, in all likelihood, remain just that, an evanescent will-o-the-wisp that leaves them with little else but to talk about it. Many times in the novel, the huge but retarded Lennie asks George, a smallish but bright thinker, to rhapsodize about their future. To George, their American Dream is a place where no one can throw them out. To Lennie, it is a place where he can raise rabbits. And it is not only Lennie and George who reach out for the unobtainable. It is arguable that nearly everyone else has their own competing dreams, with the same chance of success as Lennie and George have--none at all. The ranch hands where Lennie and George find roustabout jobs are the hopeless in search of the unobtainable. Candy is a one-armed elderly worker who seeks security for his old age. Crooks is a proud black worker who searches for racial equality in an age that did not know the term. Curley is a nastily pugnacious man who spends most of the scenes in which he appears in a hopeless and helpless Holy Grail search for his wife who spends an equal amount of time staying out of his way. And then there is Curley's wife, who is so bereft of identity that Steinbeck chooses not even to give her a name. She wanders the book like a meandering Eve, seeking only to disrupt the ordered lives of the men around her. In her search for meaning to her life, she collides with a corresponding search by Lennie for meaning in his. When she places Lennie's unthinking paws on her hair and dress, Lennie panics and unthinkingly stifles her, setting off a chain of events that forces George to play with Lennie's dream of a rabbit warren as a tearfully tragic prelude to ending that dream. In OF MICE AND MEN, Steinbeck catches not only the gritty edginess of political and emotional instability that then was ripping apart the social fabric of a pre-World War II America, he was also telling a timeless tale that suggests that for dreams to transform to reality, those dreamers had better leave the world of dreams long enough to weigh the balance of cost versus benefit. For Lennie, for Curley's wife, the price was way too high.