Ill-Informed Gadfly

My friend Violet Glaze recommended this movie to my wife because she likes vampires: not “Twilight” ninnies but the sort that suck blood and have sex. Before we popped in the DVD, I had no idea that “The Hunger,” released in 1983 and said by some to be a cult classic, was also Tony Scott’s first feature. I don’t think Tony Scott ever sets out to make a cult classic, although he’s arguably done it several times unintentionally. (His second movie was “Top Gun.”)

I spend more time thinking and writing about Tony Scott than is probably healthy. I’m fascinated by his mix of gifts and shortcomings. And they’re all on display in his precocious debut. His signature is a mix of astonishing technical virtuosity and equally stunning vapidity. His work spills forth with impressive but empty visual flourishes. As I see it, there are two recurring goals in his movies: to capture the zeitgeist and to goose the audience in any way possible. His big brother, Ridley Scott, occasionally has loftier aims and has been rewarded with Oscars and other mainstream accolades. Ridley was at his best at the beginning of his career, when he made two justly legendary movies: “Alien” and “Blade Runner.” (Although the latter, with its endless series of director’s cuts, has become overrated. Watch it more than once and you might realize how lugubrious it is.) These films earned Ridley the lasting respect of critics and cineastes, while Tony has never quite repaired the reputation he established with his contributions to 1980s culture: “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop II.” (Before Michael Bay, there was Tony Scott.) Since that decade, Ridley’s films have veered frequently into self-important bloat, while Tony keeps his lean and mean. The younger brother is more likely to appall. That’s probably why I enjoy his movies more, even when they’re terrible.

“The Hunger” is not terrible. Typical for Scott, it’s unconcerned with conventional notions of good taste, and that’s what you want in a vampire movie. It begins with a coked-out mashup of incoherent cross-cutting: an early-MTV-style musical sequence, primate research and a seduction by vampires, thrown together with little purpose and less sense. The sequence succeeds only in establishing “The Hunger” as a product of its time — an obsession for Scott. His use of aggressively of-the-moment music, fashion and technology, of course, only makes the movie look more dated in retrospect, but I’ve never gotten the sense that Scott is concerned about shelf life. He directs like a shark: always moving forward.

After the gonzo opening, “The Hunger” settles into a more sane rhythm, and the elements of a plot begin to emerge: Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and her lover, John (David Bowie), centuries-old vampires both, live in elegant, dimly lighted splendor in a vast Manhattan townhome. They become aware of research on aging by an ambitious young doctor, Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who has successfully toyed with the biological clocks of primates, manipulating them into extended youth until their age ultimately catches up with them. This research is of particular interest to John, who like Sarah’s monkeys is beginning to show his age — rapidly. His decline is precipitous, and Sarah doesn’t comprehend the gravity of his condition until it’s too late to save him. Ultimately, though, Sarah’s line of work proves an elaborate red herring, a pretext to set up the central tale: her seduction by the omnisexual Miriam. Clearly, Miriam targets her not because of her intellect or expertise but because she looks like Susan Sarandon. By the way, John does not go quietly — before he deteriorates into little more than an animated corpse, he kills and drinks the blood of his neighbor, an androgynous girl of around 12 who comes over to play the violin with Miriam. The girl’s death, like Sarah’s profession, is gratuitous, tethered only loosely to the story. Like I said: those in search of good taste ought to look elsewhere. I’m certain some aficionados of classical music also won’t appreciate how Scott raids familiar chestnuts to underline key scenes, including the central seduction sequence, which he punctuates with ample nudity. Thank you, Susan Sarandon, for your lack of inhibitions. (Deneuve, a gorgeous 39 at the time of the movie’s release, is more demure and appears to have employed a body double.)

“The Hunger” starts out manic, gets languid and then goes nuts again, with a schlock-horror finale in which Miriam, Sarah and the audience confront the horrible truth of what happens to Miriam’s old lovers. Throughout, it is an exercise in high style, from the stately music to the shadowy lighting to the entwinement of naked bodies. Scott sets out to create a mood of gold-leafed eroticism, and the images carry his signature nervous energy. I suppose you could read the film as a meditation on feminine power, a daring inversion of the conventional gender roles (dashing rake, wilting damsel) that traditionally populate vampire films. But as a critic with a working knowledge of Tony Scott, I would venture that these ideas hardly crossed his mind, or if they did, they have virtually no impact on his cinema. (A thought that might have danced around in his brain: “Hee hee, lesbian vampires!”) “The Hunger” is completely meaningless, executed without feeling or insight. It’s also thoroughly entertaining. This is what I expect in a Scott film.

After “Top Gun” and the “Beverly Hills Cop” sequel, Scott made some desultory thrillers before teaming up with Quentin Tarantino, another sensationalist with a suspect moral code, for the bloody pulp fantasia “True Romance.” Scott then entered what I would call his respectable period, working with A-listers for the submarine thriller “Crimson Tide” (Tarantino jazzed up the dialogue) and two well-received — if, once again, shallow — espionage films: “Enemy of the State” and “Spy Game.” In 2004, he went off the deep end with “Man on Fire,” easily his most appalling movie and the one that established the manic style — jagged editing, crazy subtitles, whooshing helicopter shots — in which he continues to operate. (The first five minutes of “The Hunger” offer a preview of what Scott would become.) The best example of this period is his loopy time-travel thriller “Deja Vu” (2006), which stages a terrorist attack in post-Katrina New Orleans because, hey, Louisiana offered some sweet incentives! In “The Hunger,” as in all his movies, the man does not hold back, and I think his unwavering enthusiasm is what I admire the most about him. No matter the quality of the material or the relative importance of an individual scene, you can be sure that he will direct the hell out of it.

In 1990, at age 43, Oliver Stone won an Academy Award for Best Director for “Born on the Fourth of July.” It was his second such honor, following his win three years earlier, for “Platoon.” Stone became the 16th man to receive more than one directing Oscar; Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood have since joined the exclusive club, which also includes such luminaries as Billy Wilder, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Stone’s vanquished foes that year were also impressive. He defeated Jim Sheridan, for the lyrical “My Left Foot”; Woody Allen for one of his best movies, “Crimes and Misdemeanors”; Peter Weir for the well-crafted if cloying “Dead Poets Society”; and Kenneth Branagh for “Henry V,” arguably the best Shakespearean film ever made.

The previous year, 1989, had been a great one for movies. In addition to Sheridan’s, Allen’s and Branagh’s films, it was the year of “Do the Right Thing,” “Casualties of War,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” “Drugstore Cowboy,” “Enemies, A Love Story,” “sex, lies and videotape,” “Batman,” “Say Anything,” “Heathers,” “The Abyss” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”

Most of these movies have secured their place in the film-historical firmament, either as bold artistic statements or superior popular entertainments. (”Enemies” is sadly overlooked, and “Munchausen” is more of a personal obsession.) I can’t gauge, exactly, how the reputation of “Born on the Fourth of July” has held up over the years, but I think just listing it alongside these titles makes it look wobbly. To be fair, Stone’s movie is more than just a shallow awards-grabber: It’s personal and passionate. It’s also shrill and histrionic, showy and uneven. Stone and his star, Tom Cruise, try to tell an epic tale of American heroism and political awakening. But they’re so busy insisting on Ron Kovic as an iconic figure that they lose sight of the gritty details that would create a fuller, more rounded portrait. A small example that speaks to their approach: Cruise, no whiz at accents, attempts some understated Long Island inflections. When he speaks softly, he gives Kovic a distinct voice, with a sensitive, boyish lilt that suggests the uncertainty behind his gung-ho patriotism. But much of the dialogue in “Born on the Fourth of July” is SHOUTED, and when Cruise yells, he just sounds like Cruise.

The outline of the plot is well known: After high school, young Kovic joins the Marines and volunteers to serve in Vietnam; during his second tour, a gunshot severs his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually Kovic comes to terms with his disability and becomes a prominent voice in the antiwar movement. I’m not sure, though, that Stone is really interested in the specifics of Kovic’s physical and emotional journey. He positions Kovic as a symbol of everything wrong about the war in Vietnam. Kovic develops remarkable dexterity and independence — traveling solo across the country and to Mexico. Yet to Stone, Kovic’s wheelchair is a prison, a constant reminder of his shattered manhood. Stone is obsessed with the sexual side effects of paralysis, and I imagine this movie has contributed to the misconception — corrected by the documentary “Murderball” — that men with spinal cord injuries can’t get erections. In this respect, Kovic was simply unlucky. Stone’s limp-dick fixation reaches a nadir when Kovic antagonizes his devout-Catholic mother by shouting “PENIS! BIG ERECT PENIS!” She responds, “Don’t say penis in this house!” Stone and Kovic himself adapted the screenplay from Kovic’s autobiography, but I don’t care if Kovic remembers this exchange verbatim; on screen, I didn’t believe it.

So much of the talk in “Born on the Fourth of July” is fraught with Meaning. Scenes are framed not as conversations but as political arguments. Stone struggles to convey the reversal in Kovic’s convictions through action. The third act feels rushed and incomplete: After confessing to the family of a fallen comrade about the young man’s friendly-fire death, Kovic abruptly transforms into a full-blown antiwar activist.

As Stone’s filmmaking, well, I often say that actors win Oscars not for the best acting, but for the most acting. The same goes for Stone, whose showy, subjective camerawork is sometimes spot-on, sometimes distracting. The chaotic, hallucinatory combat sequences include some of his best work, as Stone and the peerless cinematographer Robert Richardson manipulate light to show how “the fog of war” clouds the vision and judgment of a terrified grunt. Stone also fashions an underfunded veterans’ hospital into a chamber of horrors. But often he’s just whirling the camera around, using slow motion and sound effects and extreme closeups and shifts in film stock as unnecessary italics. It’s frenzied, immature filmmaking. (Compare it to the restraint shown by Brian De Palma, often unjustly criticized for his visual excesses, in “Casualties of War,” one of the great Vietnam films.) Two years later, in “JFK,” Stone would find the perfect material for his techical gifts and high-octane style. Wrong as the premise was, the process of unraveling a conspiracy galvanized Stone to do his best work; he captured the outrage of so many who feel the story of Kennedy’s assassination was never fully told. Stone was nominated for a third Oscar for “JFK” but didn’t win — too outlandish and incendiary. Looking back now, though, it’s almost impossible to believe that by then, he was already film royalty in the Academy’s eyes, thanks to his whiz-bang-boom veteran’s story.

This is an enduring piece of ’80s pulp from the reliably entertaining and subversive director Paul Verhoeven, whose recent masterpiece “Black Book” rehabilitated his foundering reputation. “RoboCop” is bloody, funny, cynical and disturbing, and it holds up well despite the dated special effects and the unmistakably ’80s look and feel to its “near-future” setting. (”Blade Runner” was more visually imaginative by far, but it’s not as much fun.) Verhoeven gets expressive performances out of a cast of talented journeymen: Nancy Allen, Miguel Ferrer, Kurtwood Smith, Robert DoQui, Paul McCrane, Ronny Cox and, of course, Peter Weller as the stolid title character, a naive cop turned indestructible cyborg. And, as in “Starship Troopers,” he brings to the screen a dark, satirical vision of humankind at its worst. “RoboCop” is punctuated by vapid newscasters reporting on truly horrific events — a malfunction of the “Star Wars” defense system fries more than 100 people in California, including two former presidents — in detached, humdrum fashion. And it imagines a government that outsources itself entirely to a corrupt corporation. In a scene typical of Verhoeven’s sadistic sense of humor, the company’s prototype crime-fighting machine guns down an executive during a boardroom demonstration. An ambitious, unscrupulous executive (Ferrer) takes the opportunity to pitch his better-designed cyborg, known as RoboCop. After Officer Alex Murphy (Weller) is riddled with bullets by members of a crime syndicate led by Smith (later to garner many laughs as the salty dad Red Forman on “That ’70s Show”), the company has its man. In a typically shrewd move, Verhoeven shoots Murphy’s death and robo-resurrection from the officer’s horrified and confused point of view. Of course, as anyone familiar with the Frankenstein story could tell you, reanimating a corpse can lead to unforeseen complications. RoboCop yearns to know his true identity and take revenge against those who massacred him. The setup allows for some inspired mayhem. In a signature Verhoeven moment, RoboCop foils a rape by shooting through the skirt of the would-be victim and hitting her attacker in the groin. And, as in “Starship Troopers,” he lets women inflict and endure just as much pain as men: The sweet, angel-faced Allen is one steely cop. The violence and bleak worldview are relentless, and yet “RoboCop” is thoroughly enjoyable, the sort of well-made and slyly intelligent trash that keeps movie lovers enthralled.

“Working Girl” is a glorious romantic comedy that effortlessly evokes the triumphs of the screwball era, with its assertive heroine, workplace setting and celebration of artful dissembling. Yet it also endures as a document of its time and place, late-80s Manhattan. If it’s not Mike Nichols’s best movie, I haven’t seen a better one — yes, including “The Graduate.” Like nearly all his movies, “Working Girl” takes place in an idealized world, but it’s consistently idealized. He envisions corporate mergers and acquisitions as an arena where hard work and ingenuity are rewarded and where no one stops to question the value of helping the rich get richer. Released in 1988, at the dawn of the multinational-corporation era, “Working Girl” makes the creation of a conglomerate look breathlessly exciting. In the world of this movie, big business is the place to be — everyone else is a clock-punching sucker. Even Mick (Alec Baldwin), the provincial cad who gets dumped, deservingly, by the heroine, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), ultimately impresses with his entrepreneurial acumen.

Mick and Tess shack up on Staten Island, and the movie strongly implies that they were born and raised there. Tess, however, dreams of the steel-and-glass towers across Upper New York Bay, and her yearning fuels the stirring helicopter shot that opens the movie — a vertiginous whirl around the head of the Statue of Liberty, then a dip into the water before a pan up to the skyscrapers of the financial district. The vista is complete only when we see the tops of those beautiful, boxy twin towers. (Evocative use of those buildings will make me choke up every time. I first visited New York when I was 7 or 8, a few years before the release of “Working Girl.” Approaching by car from New Jersey, they dominated the skyline and symbolized the promise of otherworldly delight that this frustrated urbanite, who grew up in a small town in Virginia, will always associate with Manhattan.) The city’s grandeur established, the camera veers back toward the harbor and zeroes in on a window of the Staten Island Ferry, the only transit link between the “forgotten borough” and the rest of the city. On the soundtrack, you may think at first that you’re hearing a standard, if accomplished, synth-driven and percussion-heavy 80s score, but actually it’s the beginning of a lush and catchy song by Carly Simon, “Let the River Run.” Simon dubs New York “the new Jerusalem.” We are following pilgrims to the Holy Land of high finance.

Nichols lays the groundwork for the entire movie in that one shot. And the rest never disappoints; there’s hardly a wasted scene or line of dialogue. (Kevin Wade wrote the screenplay, his first and best; he’s now the showrunner of the “Sex and the City” knockoff “Cashmere Mafia.”) Tess and best friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) ride the ferry together, and Cyn gives Tess a cupcake with three candles to mark her 30th birthday. They talk about their plans for the day; Tess is squeezing in classes on her lunchbreak and after work. She’s a secretary at a brokerage — an eminently practical one who schleps to the office in tennis shoes before changing into high heels at her desk. She knows her stuff but is frustrated by the menial tasks everyone expects her to do — like grabbing an extra roll of toilet paper for the men’s room after she barges in with an important call for her boss that she could have handled herself, if only the client were willing to hear the truth from a secretary.

Tess has a night-school business degree, but with her humble background, she can’t elbow her way into a management training program. Humiliated by her boss (Oliver Platt), who tries to set her up with a coke-snorting hedonist at another firm (Kevin Spacey), Tess takes clever revenge and quits, and is placed by her job counselor (Olympia Dukakis) in a new position. (It’s hard to imagine more impressive casting of three small roles in a 10-minute span.) This time, Tess’s boss is a woman her age, the sublimely assured Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who appears to be exactly the sort of mentor Tess needs, albeit one with the same preening sense of entitlement as her male counterparts.

Griffith is third-billed, behind Harrison Ford and Weaver, but remarkably, Ford doesn’t appear until 35 minutes in, and at that point Griffith owns the movie. Like Nichols, if she’s ever done better work, I haven’t seen it, although she’s awfully good in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” (1986) as well. She nails Tess’s restlessness and frustration, her ingenuity, her mix of self-assuredness and self-doubt. Watch the pirouette she does when Tess, posing as an executive, is asked if she wants any coffee, and she reflexively gets up to fetch it herself. Griffith’s breathy, girlish voice has often been a liability, but she uses it brilliantly here, modulating her speech depending on whom she’s addressing. As a secretary, Tess maintains the broad vowels and nasal aggressiveness of her native dialect; as a would-be executive, she softens and enunciates. (One of Tess’s classes is a speech class; Cyn asks, “Whaddaya need speech class for? You tawk fine!” Funny, but Cusack is from Chicago, not Staten Island, and she sounds like some unholy blend of the two. Cusack parlayed the big laugh lines and the even bigger hair into an an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but I think it’s maybe the 10th- or 12-best performance in the movie. Weaver also got a Supporting nod, and deservedly so; Katharine oozes competence and avarice.)

Soon after she goes to work for Katharine, Tess comes to her with an idea to get a technology firm to buy a radio station. Katharine is intrigued but later says the deal won’t fly. But after she breaks her leg skiing (the accident, Nichols being Nichols, is the most poorly executed shot in the movie), Tess discovers that Katherine plans to pursue the proposed merger behind her back. Charged with taking care of Katherine’s apartment and managing her affairs, Tess essentially becomes Katherine and schemes to take the deal herself to Jack Trainer (Ford), a merger maven at another firm.

I wasn’t prepared for how good Ford is in this movie. I’m serious: It may be his best performance. He embodies Jack with grace and sensitivity; you see his intellect come alive. Like Tess, Jack is frustrated by the business world, but for entirely different reasons. Ford makes him a sensualist, a man of outsize appetites. Watch how quickly he downs every drink he gets his hands on; he’s always in a hurry, but he’s also dying to cut loose. Even in a suit and tie, Ford remains a man of action, and he finds things to do physically that illuminate Jack’s state of mind. Dashing, smart and well-connected, Jack appears to have it all, but he’s clearly nagged by insecurities. He’s harried, unsettled. Jack and Tess meet at a party, and she passes out after mixing Valium (at Cyn’s suggestion) with tequila (at Jack’s). As Jack carries Tess up a long flight of stairs to his apartment, Ford delivers a slyly funny monologue about how he doesn’t know how clean it will be inside, because the cleaning lady keeps changing days, and other guests “have remarked on it.” Later, after an all-nighter in his office, he unbuttons his white Oxford shirt, tosses it, puts on a brand-new one and splashes his underarms with water, all the while keeping the phone pressed to his ear. His coworkers applaud. I wanted to as well. When Jack reveals that he’s in “a bit of a slump” at work, he’s wolfing down souvlaki, and the bit of yogurt sauce on the side of his mouth accentuates his vulnerability.

Still, Jack is a smoothie, and he knows it, and Ford brings his signature rakish charm. He tries to ask Tess out as they walk to an elevator, but she resists, offering a halfhearted, “You know, maybe I just don’t like you.” As the elevator doors close, he responds: “Me? Naaah.” That moment encapsulates what I love about “Working Girl.” (The movie’s not an old favorite or anything; I had never seen it before. I watched it once, and then, two days later, watched it again.)

Occasionally, Wade’s screenplay gets overemphatic, as when Katherine explicitly compares the prospect of marriage to a merger. But nothing drags this movie down — it’s so sturdy, so well-timed. The end of Tess’s relationship with Mick could be a burdensome distraction, but it’s not, because Baldwin (who became a star by appearing in five movies in 1988) is too good to let Mick slip into caricature. And the last act speeds along with astonishing energy and wit, leading up to a final shot that mirrors the first but replaces yearning with satisfaction. For me, few mainstream movies offer such deep and lasting pleasures as “Working Girl.”

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

I assume anyone who reads this has already seen “Blade Runner,” but SPOILER SPOILER just in case. I’m not treading on pristine ground here, but it’s absolutely extraordinary for a sci-fi thriller to climax with the villain speaking a line like that, just before he dies. Of natural causes! So to speak. Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer at the height of his muscled Nordic perfection) is a replicant — a lifelike android — with a lifespan of only four years. He has broken free from outer-space servitude and returned to earth to meet his creator in an attempt to extend his life. But he fails. As the genre demands, he has his climactic confrontation with Deckard (Harrison Ford), the “blade runner” contracted to wipe out Roy and three other fugitive replicants, but the fight ends with Roy simply expiring. And before he goes, he utters that bit of existential poetry — a line that perfectly sums up the themes of “Blade Runner.” Ridley Scott’s movie is a triumph of style — sci-fi layered on top of bleak and soulful film noir. With its rainy, steam-enveloped, neon-lit cityscapes, it’s a dispatch from a doomed world. The spare dialogue amplifies its feeling of loss, of lives slipping away into the void. Everyone — including, crucially, Deckard — must confront the reality of Roy’s dying words. “Blade Runner” was released in 1982, and Scott has tinkered with it frequently in the intervening years to remove unnecessary voice-over narration, punch up the images and clarify the narrative. In the recently released “final cut,” it is more clear than ever that Deckard is a replicant, too — look at his eyes. But no matter what version you see, “Blade Runner” is a watershed movie that envelops you totally in the strange, sad and beautiful world it creates.

I rented this 1988 curiosity because I wanted to become more conversant in David Cronenberg after his exhilarating “Eastern Promises” and his overrated but still noteworthy “A History of Violence.” I still haven’t seen enough to pin him down entirely — probably a good sign — although it doesn’t take a genius to notice his visual and thematic obsessions, like split personalities and our unease about the substances that make up our bodies. Aside from the two recent titles — which appear to have brought Cronenberg his widest and most unified acclaim — I’ve also seen “Videodrome” and “eXistenZ,” both of them astonishing. But the chief amazement in “Dead Ringers” is not Cronenberg’s direction but Jeremy Irons’s towering central performance as twin gynecologists. Yep, that’s right — Cronenberg isn’t above a gimmicky premise, but he always explores the implications of the setup with a serious and restless mind. Irons uses everything in his arsenal to distill the similarities and differences between Drs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who specialize in helping women conceive. In their personal lives, they share everything — sex partners included. And early on — thanks to Irons’s and Cronenberg’s shrewd work — it’s nearly impossible to tell the brothers apart. But Beverly grows dissatisfied with their divide-and-fornicate strategy when Elliot seduces fading movie star Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold). Beverly falls for her; worse, he begins to share her proclivity for pill-popping. Resentments between the brothers begin to surface, and their differences become more pronounced. There’s so much rich psychosexual terrain for Irons and Cronenberg to explore that it’s disappointing that “Dead Ringers” devolves into a cautionary tale about drug abuse. Beverly becomes an addict, and in trying to cure him, Elliot descends as rapidly — and implausibly — into pharmaceutically induced madness as Erika Christensen in “Traffic.” Still, “Dead Ringers” remains powerful, thanks to Irons’s flawless work — he has said in interviews that he wouldn’t have won the Oscar for “Reversal of Fortune” if not for this movie — and Cronenberg’s affinity for deeply troubling imagery. (That he stages scenes between Irons and Irons so seamlessly is just a small example of his mastery of the medium.)

Given the critical consensus that Michael Moore has grown as a filmmaker since this, his 1989 debut — I could see improvement even in the arc from “Fahrenheit 9/11″ to “Sicko” — I wasn’t surprised to be unimpressed when I finally sought out “Roger & Me.” At its best, it’s a heartfelt lament for the death of an American city — Moore’s native Flint, Michigan — and at its worst it goes for cheap laughs or pads its meager running time with irrelevant filler. (I realize that the eccentric woman selling rabbits — for pets or meat — was illustrative of Flint’s grim economic state, but why go back and devote a second sequence to her?)

From the start, Moore has great instincts as an entertainer. He skillfully weaves in stock footage, popular music and his own ingratiating, folksy persona. He’s also a good muckraking journalist. He has a way of asking questions so obvious that perhaps no one else would ask them — and for making them piercing. What little sense of justice “Roger & Me” provides comes at the end when we learn that the local General Motors flak, who pathetically tried to justify CEO Roger Smith’s abandonment of Flint, was fired. He worked in Flint, after all.

The gimmick, of course, is that Moore wants to ask Smith face to face why he closed all the factories in Flint. His bumbling attempts rarely entertain — who would be surprised that Smith insulates himself from a no-name, camera-wielding rabble-rouser? Moore goes to the lobby of GM headquarters; he’s turned away. He goes back later; he’s turned away again. He tries to ask Moore a question at a stockholders’ meeting, and makes it look like Smith cuts him off and laughs about it. (I’m dubious that this happened exactly as the editing suggests.) Other low points: Moore’s “gotcha” interviews with Miss Michigan and with women on a golf course. It’s disingenuous for him to imply that these people should show a deeper understanding of Flint’s troubles. (He’s better at catching celebrities off guard — Flint native Bob Eubanks makes an appalling joke about Jews and AIDS that it’s remarkable he ever recovered from.)

Moore should be applauded, though, for his devotion to and respect for working Americans. He makes an obvious but necessary point: The fewer people get paid a living wage for a decent day’s work, the richer the CEOs get. And it’s only gotten worse since 1989. “Roger & Me” is at its post poignant when it chronicles the seemingly endless evictions carried out by a beleaguered sheriff’s deputy. He has a job to do — and he takes pains to ensure that the evictees don’t think he’s to blame — but it clearly wears on him. This is the economic reality of Flint — he has to throw people out of their homes, unpleasant as he may be, because he has no other viable options. Moore also shows former auto workers taking jobs as correctional officers to staff the jails that house Flint’s exploding criminal element. One guard proves the embodiment of irrepressible American optimism when he talks about how much he likes the job — even as a profane argument between inmates breaks out behind him.

Seen today, “Roger & Me” is more relevant as a launching point for Moore than as a contribution to the documentary form. But it certainly has its moments.

After suffering through John Waters’ 2004 debacle “A Dirty Shame,” I remarked that he had been making movies for more than 30 years without ever learning how. And this is coming from someone who loves Waters — a true American original whose uproarious movies all celebrate the unrelenting strangeness of his hometown, Baltimore (where I have lived for the past seven years). I spent some time on the set of “A Dirty Shame” for an AP story that never got written, largely because nobody really cared, and I wasn’t exactly inspired by seeing the man in action as he shot some of his trademark material: clunky exposition and camp histrionics. I even overheard Chris Isaak complaining that he was getting little feedback on his performance and didn’t know whether to tone it down or go further over the top. He felt he occupied a nebulous middle ground amid the insanity, and he was right, sadly.

Rewatching the original “Hairspray” reminded me anew of Waters’ limitations. It’s less than 90 minutes long, and yet it still falls apart completely in the third act. Nearly every line of dialogue is yelled; people scurry around like startled rats; and the pace becomes dizzying because Waters has run out of plot developments. He has no idea how to get all his characters in the same place for the climax, so they just show up without explanation.

And yet … I loved it. It’s a terrific movie, and all of a piece, because no one but Waters could have tapped into the potential of “The Buddy Deane Show,” a cheap, local “American Bandstand”-style program that aired on weekday afternoons in Baltimore in the early 60s, with clean-cut high school kids dancing to the latest hits. Waters actually appeared on it a couple of times, and he brilliantly lampoons the cutthroat backstage culture, with teenagers as local celebrities and arbiters of taste. “The Corny Collins Show,” as Waters redubs it, is the biggest thing in their world, and they’re stars. He subverts them at every turn, visiting an endless stream of humiliations upon the ice-princess queen bee Amber von Tussel (Colleen Fitzpatrick).

Waters’ hero, of course, is Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), a pleasantly plump teenager who dreams of shaking her ample tail feather on “Corny Collins.” She soon gets her chance, to the indignation of Amber and the shock of her mother, Edna (Divine). But Tracy isn’t satisfied breaking down the chubby barrier; she crusades to end the show’s segregationist practices. Blacks and whites aren’t allowed to dance together, and once a month the show hosts “Negro Day.”

Despite the star power of the new musical version, the performances in the original hold up well, because Waters cast unknowns who were perfect for the roles. I still think Ricki Lake is the best Tracy, and Divine, of course, lives up to his name. Unlike John Travolta, who gets laughs with an exaggerated Baltimore accent, Divine is believable as Edna. The fact that he was male is immaterial, so fully does he inhabit this overweight Highlandtown hausfrau. He knocks Waters’ awkward, declamatory dialogue out of the park. “It’s the times, Wilbur. They’re a-changin’. Something’s blowing in the wind. Fetch me my diet pill.”

Shawn Thompson, as Corny Collins, is remarkably good, because he looks and feels like a local TV guy who understands how the show resonates with people but whose hosting duties make him mildly uncomfortable. (Viewers send telegrams — telegrams! — to Corny, and he reads them on the air.) Young Elvis lookalike Michael St. Gerard is fantastic, too, as the dreamy Link Larkin. I loved how Waters makes him a horndog who wants to feel up Amber, and later Tracy, at every opportunity. Seaweed, too, moans at pleasure at being allowed to go to second base with Penny Pingleton; Clayton Prince and Leslie Ann Powers, who play the parts, are sweet and unassuming.

Waters’ festively demonic personality seeps through his first PG-rated movie. He’s great at depicting hysterical white panic at the prospect of integration. Penny’s mom (Joann Havrilla) has a complete meltdown when she has to “rescue” Penny from a black neighborhood. Later, she enlists a psychiatrist (played by Waters himself) who tries to hypnotize Penny out of her interest in Seaweed. (”Think about all the nice white boys at your school, and how you’d like to date them,” he purrs.) When protesters are demanding that “Corny Collins” be integrated, one of them holds a sign that reads, “Amber Is an ASSHOLE,” with the “O” drawn to look like, well, you know. And Waters throws in a completely unnecessary but priceless scene with Tracy and pals hiding out with a couple of beatniks (Pia Zadora and Ric Ocasek), for no reason other than he thinks it’s funny that Baltimore would have beatniks. The new “Hairspray” is fun and sugary and buoyant, and the original is too — but it’s also delightfully weird.

Especially in the wake of “Grindhouse,” with car chases staged for their own sake, it’s exhilarating to see George Miller’s action masterpiece, a sequel to the ultra-low-budget (but still brilliant) “Mad Max.” (In Australia it was released in 1981 as “Mad Max 2″; in the U.S. it came out a year later as “The Road Warrior” because the original had not been seen here.) Miller stages car chases that the fate of humankind will turn on, at least humankind as it exists in the post-apocalyptic Australian outback. Which, if you find yourself in the Australian outback after the apocalypse, is the only humankind that matters.

Mel Gibson stars as Max Rockatansky, a former highway patrolman whose family was slaughtered in the first movie. Now, he’s cast adrift, driving aimlessly and picking fights with the hooligans who rule the roads. Their supremacy, though, is tenuous, contingent on their ability to procure the world’s most precious commodity: gasoline. The success of “Mad Max” afforded Miller a much bigger budget, allowing him to etch a post-apocalyptic wasteland more convincingly. Plus, we get to see how society has devolved since the first movie, when anyone could fall victim to roving gangs but some semblance of civilization remained. In “The Road Warrior,” it’s a free-for-all. The police force is a distant memory, and Max drives the last remaining “Interceptor” cruiser.

Miller’s pace is relentless, his action superheated with tension and kinetic energy. He uses “wipes” to transition between scenes more evocatively than even George Lucas. The score, the pace of the editing, everything propels the movie relentlessly forward. The story is beautifully simple: Max stumbles upon a refinery guarded by a dwindling number of ordinary men, women and children. They are beseiged by the villains, clad in outlandish S&M gear (some are openly homosexual, although it appears to be a choice driven by the scarcity of women, as in prisons). After tangling with one of the nastiest bad guys, a Mohawked psychopath named Wez (Vernon Wells), he agrees to salvage a rig that will help the good guys drive out of the wasteland to safety. (I had to look up Wez’s name; people rarely refer to each other by names, and in the credits the monikers of important characters are mostly descriptive, like the Gyro Captain and the Feral Kid. Conversation has become a relic of a kinder, gentler time; the Feral Kid doesn’t talk because he doesn’t need to. He growls.)

“The Road Warrior” is a gearhead’s paradise. Octane is king. Miller conducts a symphony of collisions: steel against pavement, flesh and more steel. Movies like this are why movies were invented.

It’s strange to see a Michael Mann movie that isn’t completely assured. “Manhunter,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Heat,” “The Insider,” “Ali,” “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” — whatever their shortcomings, they represent breathtaking control of film grammar and aesthetics. “Thief,” released in 1981, was Mann’s first feature, and while it announces him as a rare and prodigious talent, it also shows him falling in love with indifferent slo-mo gunplay and a loud, undistinguished electronic score by Tangerine Dream. (On the DVD commentary he eloquently defends his choice of electronic music, but this particular electronic music does a disservice to this otherwise subtly textured movie.)

James Caan stars as Frank, who since his release from prison has fashioned himself into one of Chicago’s premier safecrackers. He’s approached by a shadowy crime syndicate led by Leo (the great Robert Prosky, oozing sinister entitlement from his plump, soft features). Meantime, he woos Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a woman with a troubled past, and Mann demonstrates his underrated skill as a writer of dialogue in an extaordinary 10-minute scene in which Frank pours out his life story to Jessie, whom he barely knows, in a coffee shop. At the end, she quietly takes his hand and agrees to be his companion.

Mann demonstrates his legendary commitment to research and authenticity by using real thieves as consultants (and, at times, as actors) and by having Caan crack open real safes. Like all his movies, “Thief” chronicles a man at the very pinnacle of his profession, whose commitment to his job penetrates into every nook and cranny of his life. Mann and his actors work rigorously to develop characters’ backstories, creating genre films with soul and specificity. Frank was a ward of the state, shaped by the streets and prison, and he has almost pathetically underdeveloped ideas about interpersonal relationships and how to build a life. He carries with him a collage that represents his simplistic personal idyll.

The fruit of Frank’s scores means little to him. He’s committed to the process, to the planning and execution. In the big score at the center of the movie, Frank looks bored and spent at the point where his partners are actually cleaning out the safe: His work, at this point, is already done.

The quiet moments in “Thief” are the most extraordinary: Frank and Jessie trying to adopt a child; Frank turning on the water and whispering to Jessie that their house is bugged; and their chillingly desolate final scene together, after Frank has found that he’s unable to break free of the crime ring he reluctantly started working for.

Mann is a true auteur, one who brings the same thematic concerns to all his movies and who, to some extent, tells the same story over and over again. “Thief” can be read as Version 1.0 of Mann’s brilliant, existential crime saga, “Heat.” It follows a path remarkably similar to the Robert De Niro sequences in “Heat,” without the counterbalance of the Al Pacino character. It’s remarkable how many scenes in “Thief” he revised, refined and used again in the later movie. “Heat” actually went through two iterations before it emerged in its complete and masterful form. Mann made it as a 1989 TV movie called “L.A. Takedown,” which even used the same character names. I haven’t seen it, but it’s easy to figure that, with journeyman actors and a two-hour running time, it had nothing close to “Heat’s” gravitas. Give Mann credit: He kept remaking the movie until he got it right. No wonder he thought the themes and milieu of “Miami Vice” were worth revisiting even after a TV series that ran for five seasons.