The term “great movie” implies something of the film’s scope and size: to be “great” it must do something, say something, capture something. It must be massive or earth-shattering. On his current course, then, Richard Linklater will never make a “great” film. He is too interested in minutia, in average people dealing with the complex moral, ethical, intellectual, and sexual problems of everyday life. I love his films because he aims for small statements instead of grand ones, and he hits the mark nearly every time.

In 2001’s TAPE, he turns a complex one-act stage play into a sassy digital feature. Shot in six days in a cramped hotel room, the story first introduces Ethan Hawke’s Vince while downing a can of Rolling Rock and simultaneously pouring another into the bathroom sink. He crumples and tosses the empties haphazardly. We are confused. He repeats the process with two more Rolling Rocks. Soon it becomes clear. For an unknown reason, he is setting a scene of drunken disorder.

Eventually Jon (Robert Sean Leonard) arrives. He scolds Vince for losing another girlfriend and for continuing a life of part-time volunteer firefighting and full-time drug dealing. He is pointed in his criticism but caring as well. They are supposed to go out to dinner, but now Vince decides he doesn’t want to. Slowly, the conversation turns to their shared past with Amy (Uma Thurman), a girl they had both dated in high school. One accuses the other of raping Amy. A confession is demanded, and eventually given, and secretly taped. Then Amy arrives and throws the whole situation into chaos. Will the rapist confess? Will Amy even remember the incident? Will she admit it if she does?

Hawke and Thurman were married and are now divorced, and both are famous more for their portrayals of specific brands of cool than for their acting: Hawke a detached Gen X poet-slacker-intellectual; and Thurman, as Quentin Tarantino’s expression of the uber-woman. Both are far more talented than all that, and their untapped reserves are on display in TAPE, along with those of costar Leonard, who is possibly the strongest of the three. He brings each step of his emotional journey such immediate honesty that we focus so intensely on him that we are unable to see plot developments that should be obvious. Thurman plays Amy as an enigmatic force; appropriate for TAPE’s heavily masculine viewpoint.

TAPE is a single conversation, in real time, just like Linklater’s recent BEFORE SUNSET. But while SUNSET was shot in wide shots and lengthy takes, TAPE’s shots bounce all over the tiny hotel room setting like a frequently struck ping pong ball. The dialogue flows with the spontaneity of a long take, but the shots fly fast suggesting a multicamera approach that does not sacrifice visual rhythm for audio rhythm. Linklater’s style and the entire form of the film is perfect for the subject matter; the film isn’t really about a ten year old rape that may or may not have happened; but the emotional implications that resonated with three people for a decade, regardless of what happened. Seeing this conversation, then, is far more important to this story than seeing the rape.

Is it a great film? By any standard definition, no, probably not. Is it a very good film by a filmmaker who is growing with each new release? Certainly. Will you go out and rent it after reading this? I hope so.

IF YOU LIKED TAPE, CHECK OUT: SLEUTH (1972) another play turned movie with a small cast and a single setting, that turned into a terrific movie, if not a great one.

THE BAD

DEAD HEAT ON MERRY-GO-ROUND, a genial but unsatisfying con man movie, offers a vivid example of the do's and don'ts of its genre. Here's a guide to the key points:

DO - have a charismatic lead
James Coburn stars as career criminal Eli Kotch. He begins the film behind bars, bearing his soul to the jail psychiatrist, who just happens to be a fetching blond woman. After receiving parole (and shagging the psychiatrist) he heads off across the country, evading police and planning a huge score. Coburn, at the height of his stardom, is terrific as Kotch, nimbly changing his accent with each new identity, from Midwestern to Southern to New England. Though Kotch has an impossible success rate with women, Coburn's charisma makes their adoration believable.

DON'T - rely on charisma alone
The problem isn't Coburn, but the screenplay, written by director Bernard Girard. It provides the actor with numerous opportunities to show off his talent with regional dialects, but few insights into the psychology of the character. Vagary gives Eli a sense of roguish mystery but simultaneously undercuts the character with a frustrating uniformity. And while one can watch a heartless womanizer through a whole film, it helps to make him at least one other thing besides a heartless womanizer.

DO - devise an impossible caper
Caper movies work best when the criminals in them think big: if you're going to have the audience sympathize with a bunch of outlaws, it helps to stick them in a situation they can't possible win. Viewers traditionally love the underdog, even when the underdog happens to be planning illicit activities. DEAD HEAT has a doozy of a plan: rob a bank in the Los Angeles Airport while the police are distracted by the arrival of a Russian dignitary. In other words, perfect fodder for a heist movie.

DON'T - make the caper impossible to follow
Despite its creative crime, DEAD HEAT's finale is almost completely devoid of suspense because the specifics of Kotch's scheme are so painfully unclear that at any given moment we do not know whether he is succeeding or failing. For instance we know that the plan involves the arrival of the Russian dignitary by airplane, which will distract the police. As Kotch's goons move into the bank, the FBI gets word that the Russian's airplane is delayed. Immediately we assume that this will affect the heist, but the criminals don't seem adversely affected by it; in fact, they never even hear about the delay. Did they somehow plan it? Does it matter? If not, why does it happen? Consider how the plan is presented in 2001's OCEAN’S ELEVEN. The entire team -- along with the audience -- are given the plan by George Clooney's Danny Ocean. He tells us what needs to happen for success at each step of the way; a door that needs to be opened, a code that needs to be acquired, a laser beam system that needs to be disarmed. This could makes the plot less suspenseful or surprising, but the opposite is true; we are more invested in the story because we know what should happen and grow nervous when it doesn't (this also allows the director to better play with the audiences emotions by teasing our expectations).

DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND might please fans of this period (the costumes and bed-hopping make it very much a film of the 1960s) but not of this genre. Harrison Ford fans should note that it contains his first role, as a bellboy with three lines of dialogue, though I’m sure he’d wish his debut came in something with a bit more impact. You can learn a thing or two by watching DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND, but that doesn't mean you'll necessarily enjoy it.

INSTEAD OF DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND, CHECK OUT: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN (1969), Woody Allen’s first film as a director, about a career criminal named Virgil Starkwell whose own bank robbery runs awry when the cashier cannot read the ransom note.

THE UGLY

THE GREEN SLIME has all manner of late 1960s special effect at its disposal and it uses every one of them poorly. Miniatures? Chincy. Puppets? Awful. Gore makeup? Laughable. Monsters in rubber suits? Even worse than usual. The only thing good about THE GREEN SLIME is the fact that so many things go so horribly wrong that it turns into one of the grandest science-fiction comedy of errors you'll ever see.

SLIME begins as an ARMAGEDDON-style space adventure by way of "Captain Video." Space hero-type man Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) makes his way to the Gamma III Space Station, where he must coordinate a mission to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The station is in under the command of Captain Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), who must cede to Rankin's authority, even if he happens to be sort of a jerkwad. For some unknown reason the blowhard, drunk-with-power Rankin is made the hero of the piece, while the sensitive, caring Elliot is frequently scapegoated over any problem the station encounters. Rankin and Elliot's efforts to destroy the asteroid are successful, but one of their crewmen inadvertently returns to Gamma III with a surprise visitor: a mysterious green slime.

This slime is a hell of a space creature. It oozes, it pulses, it bubbles, it drips up walls somehow. Depending on its age, weather, barometric pressure, and the record of the New York Giants it assumes various appearances: in some scenes it looks like the bottled gack they used to sell in toy stores, in others, like a boiling hot puddle of Ecto Cooler. The slime grows at an astronomical rate, and eventually transmogrifies into lumbering creatures with floppy, spark-shooting tentacles and a big red eyeball. Unfortunately, the creatures feed off of electricity so energy weapons are sort of worthless, and our dopey heroes take to fighting them off with whatever they have on hand: sticks and bed linens and such.

You wouldn't think you could build an entire movie about the threat of a giant, multiplying space booger, and you would be correct. Despite the presence of several characters whose sole purpose is to shout phrases like "Hurry! There's no time!" nothing in THE GREEN SLIME even resembles suspenseful filmmaking. Nor would you think it was a good idea to give a sci-fi picture entitled THE GREEN SLIME it's own theme song, and again you would be correct, and again the movie throws caution to the wind and provides a swinging 60s pop song called "The Green Slime." You wouldn't think it would be a good idea to incessantly shove cliched dialogue into the mouths of the characters, and you would be correct a third time, but THE GREEN SLIME does it over and over again -- this may the only time in movie history someone actually yells "That's a risk we're going to have to take!" and does not mean it ironically.

The bloom does come off the rose a bit by end of SLIME's 90 minutes -- there's only so many times a man getting electrocuted by a lumbering, mucus-covered space octopus can make you laugh -- but by that point you've gotten your money's worth several times over. This is one of the brightest stars in the ugly movie firmament

IF YOU LIKED THE GREEN SLIME, CHECK OUT: YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION (1979), the finest use of slime in pop culture history. When’s the key television show of my childhood going to get the DVD release it so richly deserves? I don’t know!