every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the J’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)
Joint Security Area (2000)
The Joker (1928)
The Joker is Wild (1957)
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
Joseph Kilián (1963)
Le jour se lève (1939)
The Foghorn Leghorn (1948)
Survivors (3rd season, 1976)
Joint Security Area (2000)
North and South Korea are still technically at war (true!), so tensions are high after an incident at the border that left two NK soldiers dead.
The Swiss manage a Joint Security Area between the two countries, trying to maintain their famous neutrality, so their investigation of the incident is overseen by a female Swiss officer of Korean ancestry who’s never been to Korea before, and speaks Korean only as her second language. She’s instructed by English-speaking superiors to maintain neutrality at all costs.
Says a South Korean officer: “There are two kinds of people in this world: commie bastards and the commie bastards’ enemies. Neutrality has no place here.”
Political and military intrigue up the yin-yang, then, in a whodunit where nobody really wants to know who done it. All the witnesses have signed depositions that purport to describe what happened, and one of them helpfully signed his deposition while he was in a coma.
Director Park Chan-Wook unzips the body bags bit by bit and masterfully, in a kickass thriller about the human consequences of imaginary borders.
It’s also fun.
And the end, and especially the final shot, is unforgettable.
Helpful hint for any non-Koreans: The commies of the North wear red shoulder bars, while the capitalist South soldiers wear green. Other that that, they’re as different as Dr Seuss’s Sneetches, some having stars on their bellies, and some not.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Joker (1928)
A man is seriously injured in an accident, and instead of medical help he cries out for legal help, so a lawyer is summoned. The dying man tells the lawyer that he’d had a love affair with a young woman who ditched him to instead marry a rich guy, gives the woman’s love letters to the lawyer, and gallantly instructs him to burn them.
The dying guy dies, as dying people do, and the lawyer turns out unscrupulous, as lawyers do. Instead of destroying the letters he uses them to blackmail the dead man’s ex-lover. Because, you know, pre-marital canoodling is a scandal.
The Joker, meanwhile, is a dashing ladies’ man who looks like Liam Neeson, and is very good at cards — undefeated, and undefeatable. He has a name, but seems to frequently wear a many-pointed joker’s cap, hence his nickname. When the blackmailed lady’s younger sister comes to The Joker for help in fighting the blackmailer, he falls for her, and therefore must rescue her sister’s imperiled reputation.
All this is dopey as canoodling, of course, starting with the dying guy calling for a lawyer instead of a doctor. But it’s intended as a light-hearted fairy tale, and works as such.
Set during carnival-time in some European city and filmed on location there, this is your best chance to see eye-fillling century-old imagery of parades and ginormous masks on sticks and characters in crazy costumes and leggy showgirls and sweaty dances with streamers flying and balloons floating and implied debauchery all over town.
Only drawback is the one-piano musical score that never stops tinkling.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Joker is Wild (1957)
Joe E Lewis was a lounge singer in Chicago, who was offered a better price to sing at a different nightclub, and took the gig. The bar he’d left was owned by a mobster, who ominously said Lewis would regret it if he left, and indeed, bad guys beat him senseless and slash his vocal cords. So after he’d recovered, Lewis switched from singing to telling jokes.
Mostly, though, he drank a lot and then some, and was an ass to his girlfriend, an ass to his only buddy, and later an ass to the woman he married. And then… the movie ends, with only hints that Lewis might reconsider his heavy boozing and habitual assholery.
All this is allegedly true, though I’d never heard of Lewis nor seen his stand-up, so this biopic is all I have to go on. Frank Sinatra stars, with Mitzi Gaynor, Jeanne Crain, Eddie Albert, Jackie Coogan, and Beverly Garland. Garland is great, and Sinatra sings real nice. Half a dozen of Sinatra/Lewis’s stand-up jokes made me chuckle, but who thought this guy Lewis’s alcoholic life would make a good movie?
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
You presumably know the broad strokes of the story: Rev Jim Jones moved his cult from the Bay Area to South America, where they built a lovely settlement called Jonestown, and then Jones ordered his followers to drink the (generic & poisoned) Kool-Aid, killing hundreds of them.
28 years later came this documentary about the man, his mission, and his mental malfunctions. It would be better without the musical score, but it’s a compelling film, with the story well-told by survivors who’d happened to be away from the compound on Kool-Aid Day, November 18, 1978.
Jones was, we’re told, obsessed with religion from the age of 5, and he seems to have had a warm persona that drew people to him, which he used to his advantage. He promised a kinder world, and delivered it, at least on Peoples Temple premises, but once drawn in, there was no way out. An equal-opportunity provider of cyanided beverages, his believers were a happy-then-dead mix of black, white, and the odd Asian.
What happened in Jonestown is the danger of religion — get a group of people together, tell them they can overcome human frailties and insecurities by believing in things that don’t exist, the more believing the better, with no room for critical thought, and once they’ve accepted a ginormous falsehood at the center of their lives, people will do as they’re told. No matter what.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Joseph Kilián (1963)
For reasons untold and unneeded, a man is looking for Joseph Kilián. Along the way he comes to a cat-rental shop, so of course he goes in, fills out the paperwork, and rents a cat, then resumes his quest, cat in hand. When he goes to return the cat, however, the cat-rental business is gone, and he wanders through the building looking for it, and looking still for Mr Kilián.
Filmed in crisp black-and-white, this 38-minute, nearly wordless short is a story Kafka could’ve written. There are at least two shots of remarkable cinematic power — the opening sequence on the street, and a later, too brief view of the unnamed protagonist at a ginormous filing cabinet. But every moment of the film is either a little or a lot out of whack. Play this on a double bill with Brazil.
Written by Pavel Jurácek, who gave us the excellent Daisies, Ikarie XB-1, and The End of August at the Hotel Ozone.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Le jour se lève (1939)
a/k/a Daybreak
Great opening scenes, of and after a murder in an apartment building. Those first few minutes are riveting, but the rest of the movie isn’t.
The murderer, François, shoots at cops who knock at his door to investigate, then locks himself in his room, and flashes back to the story of how he came to be a killer.
This guy François is the prototype male chauvinist pig, treating his girlfriend Françoise (yeah, they’re François and Françoise) rotten even while he’s talking suave, then stealing a stuffed toy she treasures, because she wouldn’t sleep with him.
He stalks her as she goes to a bizarre nightclub, where dancing dogs on stage provide the movie’s only interesting moments after its first five minutes. Turns out Françoise is seeing the dog trainer, Valentin, but he’s so old I assumed he was her father or grandfather. At the bar, Valentin’s wife Clara inexplicably flirts with François, though he’s cold and mean, and after about two minutes of inane conversation Clara and François are in love forever, I guess.
Meanwhile, back in the apartment after the murder, cops basically machine-gun a hundred holes in François’s apartment walls, trying to kill him. But twenty minutes after that, François stands at his open window, leaning out to deliver an angry soliloquy to the street below, and no cops care enough to take a shot at him. Jeez, I’d volunteer.
Jean Gabin stars. Doug Holland yawns. Everyone says this flick is a classic, but I vacillated between being boredom and low-key anger all through the flashbacks, which are 95% of the movie.Lots of overacting and overdramatics, and the point of it all seems to be that the murderer is — surprise — a rotten schmuck.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Foghorn Leghorn (1948)
Father and son chicken-hawks raid the henhouse, but the chickens are protected by (The) Foghorn Leghorn, a man-sized rooster who acts as protector for the chickens. Prior to this short cartoon, Leghorn had been a supporting character, but here he’s promoted to star. He’s not as loud as I’d remembered or he became, but he’s pretty funny.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Survivors (3rd season, 1976)
The first season of Survivors was mainly about three main characters trying to establish a post-apocalypse community and kick-start civilization after the world is decimated by an instant pandemic. It was frickin’ excellent.
For the second season, the show’s creator was squeezed out, along with the smartest main character, Abby, and the actress who’d played her, and most of the supporting characters were killed in a convenient fire. Stock figure leading man Greg remained, but his occasionally interesting wife Jenny was demoted to a background player, and a new co-leader, Charles, and a doctor, Ruth, came aboard. It was not frickin’ excellent.
For this third season, no episodes are set in the community. Greg has taken a hot-air balloon to Norway and back, then disappeared, and Charles criss-crosses the English countryside looking for him, sometimes accompanied by Jenny, Greg’s wife. Ruth is gone, without explanation. Each episode introduces a new danger easily overcome, and a few new characters to not care about.
Slowly, an over-arching storyline develops, and it’s a story worth telling, but it’s told very, very slowly and with near-zero verve. Nothing even suggests that there’s an over-arching story until eight or nine episodes have dragged past. If you’re curious, the key to it all is episode ten, “The Last Laugh,” which is the best episode of the season, and the only one I’d recommend.
At a key moment in his travels, Greg says sourly, “I’d have done better just to have stayed home with Jenny and the kids.” No truer words have been spoken on this show. It all would’ve been better if Greg had stayed home with Jenny and the kids, and if Abby hadn’t been axed, and if the first season’s community hadn’t been literally incinerated, and if the show’s creator, Terry Nation, had still been in charge.
Want to see a truly excellent post-apocalypse TV show? Watch the first season of Survivors, but skip the second and third seasons.
Verdict: MAYBE.
1/13/2026
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note.
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No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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