Certain Hollywood comedies from the 60s seem to have been designed to work as sedatives.  Nothing much happens in them, the plot complications are so trivial that one never really worries about their resolution, and everyone involved in the production seems to be half-awake.

There's something pleasant about the phenomenon, in a mindless sort of way -- like watching golf on television while under the influence of a mild pain-killer.

The Glass Bottom Boat is such a film.  Doris Day and Rod Taylor have some minor misunderstandings on the road to romance.  A crowd of fine character actors involve themselves in the proceedings to one degree or another, with nothing much to do except display their amusing personae in the absence of any scripted wit.

The film was directed by Frank Tashlin, who had one of the wackiest imaginations in Hollywood at the time -- but he confines his energy to a few tepid bits of slapstick.  Dom DeLuise puts his foot in a pie, then gets it stuck in a trashcan -- then Doris gets her foot stuck in it, too, trying to help him out of the jam.  When they both jerk free, Dom falls into a fish pond.

Everyone seems to be going through the motions, waiting for lunch, or recovering from it.  Yet the tone of distance is so consistent, so assured, that you have to think it was deliberate -- offering an anesthetic for anxiety duly indicated and professionally administered.  Arthur Godfey, the personification of the entertainer as somnabulist, makes his film debut here -- his practiced nullity anchors the film in its odd nether world, its sleepiness.

I don't know why it's all so delightful, so soothing -- but I don't really know how codeine works, either.

Perhaps these films did for audiences of the 60s what Jared Hess's films do for us today -- tell us not to worry so much, tell us that everything, as improbable as it might sound, is going to be o. k.

Peter Jackson's King Kong has one of the most extended and impressive silent (non-dialogue) passages I've ever seen in a sound film -- the love story between Anne Darrow and Kong. It's a real love story, too, complex and moving -- sort of like a little silent film nestled inside what is otherwise a bloated and self-indulgent mess.

I thought the overall script, and the dialogue especially, was dreadful -- veering between clumsy thought-balloon character exposition and failed wit. The long build-up to the arrival at the island in the original film is masterful by comparison -- breezy, suspenseful, funny and entertaining. The build-up in the new film is just tiresome. About twenty minutes into it I seriously considered walking out and waiting to see the rest of the film on DVD someday -- but that would have been a mistake. The film really takes off with the brontosaurus stampede -- and when Darrow and the ape hook up, the film elevates itself to a higher plane (as it were.)

Naomi Watts and the CG ape give star performances, particularly when they interact, and the battle with the T-Rexes is not only thrilling visually but exciting emotionally, because it drives the relationship between Darrow and Kong.

Finally, in the stunning, breathtaking -- almost nauseating -- vertigo of the climax on the Empire State Building, the Darrow character is given a chance to repay Kong in kind for his earlier heroics in her behalf. It's a genuine dramatic climax to this wondrous silent film within a film.

It's too much, I guess, to hope for an "audience cut" of the film on DVD some day -- one that eliminates most of the pre-island stuff and concentrates on the real magical heart of the film, a brilliant new take on an old theme . . . beauty and the beast.

The explosive color and conventional grotesquerie of pre-Columbian art in Central America mixed with the mordant wit, violence and melancholy of Spanish art gave Mexico a unique and vibrant visual culture which keeps manifesting itself in ever-shifting forms -- in the playful morbidity of Jose Posada's 19th-Century popular prints, in posters from the golden age of Mexican cinema (the 1940s and 50s), in the work of the great 20th-Century Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, and now in the bold visuals of Mexican filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron.

This visual culture also hums along, sometimes magically, in the vernacular art of Mexican street signs, posters, packaging labels and handbills.  Unmitigated as these are by the academy or by corporate standards of slickness and "good taste", they offer on one level the best insights into the essence of the Mexican visual imagination.

A wonderful collection of Mexican street graphics has been published in book form, called Sensacional!, and it's a real delight.  The arty and/or academic texts included in the book cannot diminish the charm and power of its images, which resist traditional (and even post-modern) critical analysis.  You can find the book here:

Sensacional!

This film, has nothing -- whatsoever -- to recommend it . . . except Elvis Presley in his prime and a bunch of decent early Elvis songs.  Of course, that's enough.

The story, which riffs superficially on Elvis early career, is contrived, the dialogue thuds along without even a whiff of wit or believability, the photography is dull and the directing is ham-handed.  But the young Elvis prowls through this wasteland of mediocrity with an almost feral grace -- as innocent as a panther, and almost as beautiful.

He doesn't seem to realize himself the power his combination of virility and sweetness projects, and that naivete is part of his charm.  Unless you were there, and of a certain age, it's probably impossible even to imagine the effect his persona had when it appeared as if from nowhere in the middle of the Eisenhower years.  America still hasn't gotten over it, and probably never will.  He's become part of what it means to be American.

Las Vegas these days has a wretched air, like a whipped cur, as it begins its pitiful capitulation to the neo-Puritan culture of Orange County.  The ghosts of the outlaw princes who founded the place, who somehow kept its rebellious spirit alive well into the new corporate era, recede on every hand, become more insubstantial, as though unwilling to stick around and watch the glittering Granada they conjured up out of nothing become exactly like the dreary places they came here to get away from.

In this mournful atmosphere I dragged my dried-out Christmas tree down to the car and took it to the Christmas tree recycling station at Sunset Park.  Hank Williams sang on the car's CD player, mournfully.

But then on the drive home Rubber Soul kicked in and things looked more cheerful.  The tree will be ground up for mulch, something new will grow out of it.