input: This film has got to be ranked as one of the most disturbing and arresting films in years. It is one of the few films, perhaps the only one, that actually gave me shivers: not even Pasolini's Salo, to which this film bears comparison, affected me like that. I saw echoes in the film from filmmakers like Pasolini, Fassbinder and others. I had to ask myself, what was it about the film that made me feel like I did? I think the answer would be that I was watching a horror film, but one that defies or even reverses the conventions of said genre. Typically, in a horror film, horrible and frightening things will happen, but on the margins of civilized society: abandoned houses, deserted hotels, castles, churchyards, morgues etc. This handling of the subject in horror is, I think, a sort of defence mechanism, a principle of darkness and opacity functioning as a sort of projective space for the desires and fears of the viewer. So, from this perspective, Hundstage is not a horror film; it takes place in a perfectly normal society, and so doesn't dabble in the histrionics of the horror film. But what you see is the displacement of certain key thematics from the horror genre, especially concerning the body and its violation, the stages of fright and torture it can be put through. What Seidl does is to use the settings of an everyday, middle class society as a stage on which is relayed a repetitious play of sexual aggression, loneliness, lack and violation of intimacy and integrity: precisely the themes you would find in horror, but subjected to a principle of light and transparency from which there is no escape. It is precisely within this displacement that the power of Seidl's film resides. Hundstage deals with these matters as a function of the everyday, displays them in quotidian repetition, rather than as sites of extremity and catharsis - a move you would encounter in said horror genre. One important point of reference here is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder also had a way of blending the political with the personal in his films, a tactics of the melodrama that allowed him to deal in a serious and even moral way with political issues like racism, domination, desire, questions concerning ownership, sexual property and control, fascism and capitalism etc. Seidl's tactic of making the mechanisms of everyday society the subject of his film puts him in close proximity with Fassbinder; like this German ally, he has a sort of political vision of society that he feels it is his responsibility to put forward in his films. During a seminar at the Gothenburg Film Festival this year, at which Seidl was a guest, he was asked why he would have so many instances of violated, subjugated women in Hundstage, but no instances of a woman fighting back, liberating herself. Seidl replied that some may view it as immoral to show violence against women, but that he himself felt it would be immoral not to show it. An artistic statement as good as any, I think. Thank you.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: I like this episode quite a bit, Ruth Gordon is good if not a little hammy as she always was. As has been stated, the music is very good, and it has a moodiness that doesn't exist in all episodes.

But one major plot hole exists, so wide you can drive a fleet of trucks through it. It is established that the light doesn't work in the vault. Don't you think that the very intelligent Columbo or the rest of the police would have thought to check if the light bulb worked? You'd think in pretty short order they would have unscrewed the bulb and so found the note. Granted this is TV whodunit fiction, and various holes will always be found, but this seems much too glaring.

It really doesn't make Columbo out to be the hidden genius when the light doesn't work but the "death bed" testimony goes on unfound, apparently for days.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: I have been learning about the Zodiac for four years now. And I'm not saying I know much more than anyone else...in fact out of most of the people who know and read and learn about Z, I am prolly the one with the least knowledge...But I do know or at least I think I know that most of the stuff in this wouldn't happen...From how he signed his name...to how he killed people...I thought that Godfather was the worst film ever...

The cinematography was that of a five year old...not saying that my films are any better but I am not someone who is making movies for the mass population...

The acting I thought for the most part was pretty good really I did...the lead didn't talk that much on camera or at all I forget and don't know because I stopped watching...his voice overs where good...

But really spend the four dollars and 70 cents on something else...like a large pizza or something...

Until I learn how to write a review, Psycho Phil

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: Yet again, Madhur Bhandarkar takes you on a ride to the wild side. And a remarkable one it is, literally and figuratively.

Mumbai hi-society -- stars and starlets, glam dolls and witch doctors, business tycoons and broker types, yep the whole stinking lot -- are in sharp focus here. In typical tabloid fashion, their worlds unfold, with every colorful story a clever sub-plot in itself.

A struggling starlet dumped by the producer after getting her pregnant, the stewardess and her high-profile husband, the pedophile businessman and his neurotic wife, the reporters and the police captain; all shades on display and countless hues in between.

Bhandarkar does a swell job of digging up the dirt on the drama kings, the dancing queens and the living dead. Atul Kulkarni packs a punch, as does Boman Irani and Sandhya Mrudul. Konkona Sen Sharma is effective as the ex-crime beat reporter, but she could have been dolled up a little in keeping with the job change and the party circuit.

Highly focused (running time 140 min) and refreshingly different film, well worth the money.

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pos/neg ans:
positive