Movies

Panique (1947) An unpleasant, but perfectly innocent and relatively harmless, man becomes the target of intentionally malicious gossip and mob violence. A resounding condemnation of then-recent historical events, and overall a well-presented story. Michel Simon is always both repellent and attractive in all his roles and is perfect for this one. 8/10

Paycheck (2003) A nice little twenty-minute short story by P. K. Dick is padded out to a numbing action movie with car chases, explosions, people constantly crashing through windows while running and shooting, as well as lots of running and shooting, shooting while running, running while being shot at, and shooting at people who are running. You get beeping letters and whirling wireframe computer models before the credits are over!! That is a warning right there. Luckily someone would pop in every twenty minutes or so to explain the concept to us dumb schmucks who find anything other than running and shooting real tough to figure out - at one point using an apple in the explanation - I am beginning to take note of the "apple explanation" as a hallmark of quality filmmaking. Ben Affleck is the guy trying to understand the message he left for himself from the future, and he looks really good running. Rarely has anyone had such talent for the role of shallow hunk. The disparity between concept and presentation in this movie is amazing -I am sure Dick never could have imagined so many people crashing through windows in one of his stories. Kind of a chore to sit through all that crap. 2/10