The 13th Warrior
Based on Michael Chrichton's The Eaters of the Dead, the story concerns a young Arab courtier who is "drafted" to join a band of Vikings who travel north to save a kingdom from a murderous evil. I liked this movie, which worked well as a book adaptation (but then again, Chrichton seems to write things that adapt easily and well). I saw this movie as a "first-run" movie at the Puskhin movie theater in Moscow in September 1999. I hadn't been to a Russian movie house in many years, and was surprised to see two classes of seating (ordinary and de luxe), and even more surprised to be given an assigned seat after paying for a premium ticket. In what I can only call true Russian fashion, the next premium customer was assigned the seat next to mine.

Favorite movies

• Casablanca
  Okay, so shoot me. I like this film. I do not tire of it, and have lost track of the number of times I've seen it. I enjoy watching it and manage to glean some new nuance from the screenplay every time I do. I know people who have memorized large sections of dialog, and am proud to count them among my friends.

  There are a number of memorable scenes and lines in this movie. Have you ever heard anyone say something along the lines of: "I'm shocked! Shocked! To find <such-and-so> going on in this establishment!" (or something close). Well, that's one of Captain Louis Renault's lines in the movie. Another Renault's lines - "Round up the usual suspects!" - should be familiar to many.

  Among my earliest memorable recollections of this movie is an exchange between Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) and German Major Heinrich Strasser (played by Conrad Veidt). Strasser, who has been needling Blaine about the Germans occupying Paris and possibly London presses on and asks how Rick would feel about the Germans being in New York. "Well," quips Rick with mock seriousness, "there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." How true.

  Another exchange that struck a chord within me early on in my acquaintance with this film occurs as Renault (played by Claude Rains) and Rick sit outside Rick's nightclub:
    Renault: What in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
    Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
    Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
    Rick: I was misinformed.
    Renault: Hmph.

  That "Hmph" is very slight, but it speaks volumes (at least to me)!

• Cyrano de Bergerac
  I prefer the old version (with José Ferrer, filmed in 1950, for which Ferrer won an Academy Award) over the recent efforts starring Gerard Depardieux (in a film of the same name) and Steve Martin (in a film called Roxanne, described by a colleague of mine as "the cartoon version" of Cyrano), but these latter are watchable, too.

• My Favorite Year
  Another film I can watch repeatedly. Peter O'Toole does a bang-up job at playing an over-the-hill famous actor, and you can see Mark Linn-Baker before he got famous in real life.

• Inherit the Wind
  Besides great performances by Spencer Tracy and Fredrick March, this film successfully tackles something that few, if any films do today: it depicts a battle of ideas. And it does so without gunfire, high-speed car chases, explosions, or other mayhem. This film could never be made today.

Infatuations

• Alien
  Aliens
  Alien³
  Alien: Resurrection
  Good, scary stuff, with appropriate gunfire, explosions, and other mayhem you need to make sure the acid-spewing baddies join their ancestors. The first film probably belongs up among my favorites, but the three sequels, however, were never able to recapture the atmosphere of the original. Taken as a group, these films are a fairly humdrum series of movies.

  The first sequel, Aliens still kept some of the tension of the original, as the rescuers become increasingly aware of what they face. And the third film, Alien 3 showed a lot of promise in the trailers, but apparently everyone involved in this effort was getting tired of the gig, or the powers-that-be figured the third installment was going to be a no-brainer; at any rate, the second sequel is far and away not as good as its two older siblings, in my opinion. As I watched the film, I kept asking myself, "What is the point?" and just when the director starts hinting that there might be one to this movie, Ellen Ridley does the Dutch act into a pool of molten metal. Sheesh.

  The latest sequel, Alien: Resurrection, was somewhat better than number three (and is certainly an entertaining film), but the magic, in my opinion, is long gone. One could argue that this is an entirely different movie, divorced in all respects from its predecessors, except for Ripley, a herd of aliens, and the obligatory more-human-than-human cyborg. Gone is the painstakingly crafted suspense of Ridley Scott's 1979 original, and while there was some attempt to recapture the heart-stopping pulse of Cameron's 1986 sequel, the aliens are no longer mysterious, merely murderous. They have become, in effect, formula characters along the lines of, for example, the small and highly dangerous robots that attacked the Jupiter II and the Smith family in the recent film Lost in Space.

• Aleksandr Nevsky
  Okay, so the thing is shot a bit like a kung-fu movie, where the Germans are the bad guys (boo...hisss...), and the Russians are the good guys (yayyy....hoorahh...). I caught on fairly quickly that this was pretty simple-minded stuff, and for a long time I thought I could watch this film over and over again, with the Prokofiev score as icing on the cake, but now I'm not so sure. Perhaps my mood was sour the last time I watched this film, or perhaps I was simply infatuated with this film.

  This film is still, in my opinion, worth a look if you've never seen it, as it presents a very unique view of life. (Plus, it's amusing to try to spot all of the rather ill-disguised references, visual and otherwise, to the Nazis who - ostensibly - were allies of the Soviet regime that produced this film.)