Jaime N. Christley

This short animated film deserves a brief comment, but most certainly a complimentary one. The premise (or "plot") involves a concert pianist trying to get ready for a major recital. The pianist is a ridiculous, "cartoon-ish" character, while the room around him is painted like a Monet. The humor of the piece comes from his countless, failed attempts to actually sit down and practice - not due to outside forces, but because of his own procrastination. And when he does sit down to play (and he is capable of playing quite brilliantly, which is shocking, considering how silly he is drawn), he keeps messing up and getting angry.

What I find to be so wonderful, apart from the humor, is the way that "Getting Started" so perfectly portrays procrastination, realistically, and with deft timing. The film is light, meaningless fun, but it is wickedly funny and perfectly constructed. Love it.

Amazing film. The reviews posted - at the time of this writing - on the IMDb page are sad, because I don't think the writers were ready for what kind of movie it is. (Stephen Holden's pan in the New York Times is especially foolhardy and thoughtless.) It helped to have a little advanced word, in order to brace myself. As it stands, it should have defeated "Dancer in the Dark" at Cannes last year, handily. And if I see a better movie this year, it'll be something for the history books.

It's not for the faint of heart. It's three hours and thirty-seven minutes long, in black and white, and in Japanese. And it's very slow-moving. The cinematography is beautiful, but that may not be enough for folks to hack through nearly four hours.

But the extreme length and slowness is not unjustified. It opens with a horrifying, traumatic event that provides an emotional undercurrent that informs the remainder of the story, in much the same way as "Saving Private Ryan" did (let that not discourage the anti-Spielbergers), and as the film progresses, the event becomes a memory, part of the characters' and ours, too. And the slowness isn't really slowness - it's the playing out of events and interactions as they would happen in real time (the story spans a few months, I believe, perhaps even a year, and maybe more).

"What's the freaking story?" I hear you ask...well, here goes. The opening sequence, which will undoubtedly inspire comparisons and contrasts to "The Sweet Hereafter" (as will the entire film), shows the hijacking of a commuter bus by a businessman pushed over the edge. As the scene unfolds, he has already killed a few passengers, the police are surrounding the bus, and he has used newspapers to block all the windows.

Without revealing too much, the bus driver and two teens - a brother and a sister - survive the incident. The driver (Koji Yakusho, star of "Shall We Dance?" and "The Eel") is shaken deeply, and leaves his brother and parents to wander. The youths' mother runs off with another man, and their father dies soon after in an auto accident - with insurance payments, they can live, but there is no one to watch over them.

I could go into more of the plot - and most critics will, I'm sure - but that isn't really necessary. The key to the movie is that the events seem to be played out as they would in real life, and that the movie camera just "happens to be there" to catch them and tell the story. Sure, this is the goal of all narrative films, but with "Eureka," the process seems to have been reinvented and renewed. The film is longer than most, but not a moment is wasted; it's one of the most efficiently edited movies I've ever seen. Every shot, nuance, glance, spoken word, everything has a reason for being.

There are some who say the movie is too somber, too gloomy. It isn't really. It's somber, sure, but it doesn't strain for it. There is humor - deadpan, mostly - and great joy, too. And if you love great cinema, there is even greater joy!

It's strange that the best performance John Wayne ever gave on film was one that was not in a western, where he was not in the lead, and where he did not play, essentially, himself. Ask someone what Wayne's best work as an actor was; they look at you strangely, shrug, and walk away. Whenever he tried an accent or a bunch of makeup, he flopped. Here, though, as the Swede sailor Ole, he fits perfectly. His tired face becomes poignant, his tall, forceful presence paints him as a gentle giant, rather than as the salt-of-the-earth cowboy he is best known for.

If the opening shots -- the haunting island music, the wind making everything sway in the night air, the island women flirting with the sailors, the sailors flirting back -- doesn't hook you through the sheer force of ambiance alone, you probably won't like "The Long Voyage Home." If you're expecting an exciting sea adventure with the joe average John Ford job of direction, you'll be disappointed. If you're in the mood for something of a nautical mood piece; the adventures of merchant sailors from bar to bar, the tragedy of being affiliated with the wrong ship, naval warfare in the early twentieth century, etc., check this out.