Flickgrrl

First Ingmar Bergman. Then Michelangelo Antonioni.

On the same day Death (that's him, left, playing chess with Max von Sydow in Bergman's The Seventh Seal) took the film poets of death.

Both filmmakers brought existential themes to the movies. Both suggested how an exterior landscape mapped the interior of a man's soul. Their deep-dish disquisitions begot art-houses where fims were actively dissected and debated rather than passively consumed.

Theirs were the films that made me want to write about films.

Visionary filmmakers or high priests of pretentiousness? For those who might not be familiar with their work, what's your favorite Bergman or Antonioni homage? Mine are Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a Bergmanesque meditation on art and faith and seeing, and Brian DePalma's Blow Out, inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up.

That's Chris Tucker (left) and Jackie Chan (right), of Rush Hour 3, a formula action comedy that, like its predecessors, is improbably effective. In fact, I'm willing to nominate Chan and Tucker as candidates for most entertaining mismatched movie duo, illustration of the principle that opposites attract.

The requirements, it would seem, for this kind of team is that one possess all the traits that the other lacks. In the case of the Rush Hour pair, Tucker excels in verbal comedy, Chan in the physical variety.

The mismatched comedy duo goes back at least to Laurel & Hardy, where in movie after movie the skinny, lazy one ruined the methodical plan of the fat schemer. It continued through the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals where the patrician-looking Fred twirled and pratfalled with the plebeian joker Ginger. (He gave her class, it was said; she gave him sex.) The salt-of-the-earth Spencer Tracy and upper-crust Katharine Hepburn had a similar act, in reverse, in the 1940s. That was also the era of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, the tightly-wound guy and his laidback pal. They were followed by their '50s iteration, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Mr. Slob and Mr. Suave. I can't think of any '60s counterparts, but would nominate Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, the nebbishy intellectual and goddessy space cadet, as the 1970s models.

I skipped over Abbott & Costello, Aykroyd and Belushi, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. But you don't have to. Your favorite mismatched comedy duo? Show your work.

Maybe it was Jessica's Winter's provocative essay about Al Pacino. Maybe it was because The Godfather and Scarface have been in heavy rotation on cable.

But I've been thinking hard about Pacino's evolution as an actor. (That's him as The Godfather Michael Corleone in the fedora, and as Ocean's 13 adversary Willie Bank in the Pepto Bismol pink tie).

Admittedly I roll my eyes at the screen when Pacino exaggeratedly rolls his in one of his bombastic performances ( Ocean's and Scent of a Woman ). But to paraphrase a Pacino line, just when I think I can count him out, he pulls me back in.

Has any other actor of his generation created (or reinterpreted) more memorable characters? Michael Corleone. Frank Serpico. Sonny (in Dog Day Afternoon). Tony Montana. Ricky Roma. Carlito Brigante. Big Boy Caprice (Dick Tracy.) Lowell Bergman (In The Insider.) Lt. Hanna (Heat). Tony D'Amato (Any Given Sunday). Roy Cohn (Angels in America.) Shylock. And, no offense to Jack Nicholson, Pacino was the creepiest and most debauched movie Satan ever (The Devil's Advocate).

While Winter is correct in observing that lately Pacino is often more the overactor than the actor, barking lines like an overexcited terrier, she fails to suggest why.

My hunch is that with all the cosmetic surgery Pacino seems to have had, he has seriously compromised his greatest instrument, that most expressive face. His performances are increasingly dependent on his voice. (I have no hard evidence that he has had surgery. But look at his movies from Sea of Love forward and you'll note the eyes, cheeks and jowls are more sculpted, less mobile.) Some recent Pacino performances remind me of those Clutch Cargo cartoon where only the characters' lips move.

Am I alone in thinking that those performers -- and I include Meg Ryan of the collagen lips and Michael Douglas of the lifted and chiseled jawline -- who try to save face by going under the knife are knifing their most precious asset?

Your thoughts? Favorite Pacino performances? Pacino or Nicholson? Show all work.

What is Audrey Tautou (pictured, as Amelie) watching? Probably one of her favorite non-English language features. The estimable Edward Copeland, friend of film and e-friend of Flickgrrl, is inviting cinephiles and movie geeks to cast ballots for theirs. (Click on Eddie's link to see list and voting instructions.) Amelie is among the nominees that range from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Z. I like this list (maybe because I was one of the nominators). Is anything missing?

Both because the films I love are all number one in my book and because on Tuesday I might choose Wild Strawberries and on Friday Y Tu Mama Tambien ), I don't like ranking my favorites hierarchically. But Eddie Copeland asks voters to. So, I'll show you mine -- Max Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de... -- if you show me yours. Tell why you chose this as your number one film, and I'll post about my love for Madame de... .

"A spectre is haunting contemporary cinema: The shaky shot," writes film scholar David Bordwell. He may need a new timepiece to clock the ever-quicker duration of the average shot length (ASL) in movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum (that's Matt Damon, as Bourne, pictured), a film that worked on my central nervous system like amphetamine. I was so pumped after the screening that I could have taken "the Rocky steps" at the Philadelphia Museum four at a time. For me, Bourne director Paul Greengrass put me in Bourne's running shoes and palpitating heart.

But what was exhilarating for me is off-putting to many other moviegoers who reached for the Dramamine to counteract the motion sickeness they experienced, as Roger Ebert reports in a recent column.

In his consideration of the "run-and-gun" effect employed by directors such as Greengrass and Tony Scott, Bordwell cites a Hong Kong cinematographer's saying about the shaky camera. "The handheld camera covers three mistakes: Bad acting, bad set design, and bad directing." True. But the "unsteadicam," as Ebert dubs it, also cinematically expresses a sense of physical and psychic instability that you can't get from the well-wrought, deep-focus single-take shot.

For moments of emotional catharsis, give me a continuous take in deep focus. For pure action -- and that's what Bourne is -- I enjoy run-and-gun.

Your thoughts? Any movies spoiled for you by the jittery handheld camera?