Since the weather is going to be mediocre this weekend, and you are probably still recovering from the three days of partying last week in honor of the Flag Day-Father's Day-Bloomsday holiday trifecta, Bwog enlisted newbie critic Brandon Hammer to brainstorm some classic and not-so-classic films that would fall into the general category of appropriate summer rentals.

Nostalgic for Camp: Heavy Weights (1995)

For those whose greatest memories of summer are when they could escape from their parents, school, and everything else at camp, Heavy Weights will bring you back to these more innocent times. Co-written by Judd Apatow, Heavy Weights is the story of a group of overweight boys, whose historically fun Camp Hope is taken over by a weight-loss maniac (played by Ben Stiller). What follows is the oppression, and subsequent rebellion, of the campers. The film is hilarious with great acting by Stiller and Tom Hodges, whose character (Lars) is a hysterically funny uber-European exercise fanatic.

In which BW culture editor Paul Barndt presents a swashbuckling throwback.

Now that you've had a chance to see Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog three or four times, rent Edison Force, his feature film debut, a cop thriller also featuring Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman, as well as LL Cool J, Dylan McDermott, and Cary Elwes. It never saw a theatrical release, and with a cast that strong, a straight-to-DVD release can only mean one thing: this movie's bad. But it's not that bad—in many ways it's a poor man's Training Day, and some of you poor souls actually liked that movie. Maybe you'll like this one, too.

The action begins with a meaningless "life on the streets is tough" voiceover from Rafael Deed (LL Cool J), the newest member of FRAT, an elite police force that patrols the city of Edison. Deed soon realizes that the FRATboys are crooked, debauched, and homicidal, and justifiably begins to have second thoughts about his new brothers-in-arms.

Meanwhile, Timberlake is a plucky young journalist uncovering FRAT's corruption, with a little help from Freeman, his editor, and Spacey, a police investigator. The story is baggy, taking up and dropping subplots as it pleases. But at its core, Edison Force is a conventional and gripping enough action flick, one that should compel you to watch you all the way through. With all these A- and B-list actors working with C-list material, some priceless moments are bound to emerge. Watch LL brandish a flamethrower! Watch Dylan McDermott shoot a cheerleader! Watch those three greats of the silver screen—Spacey, Freeman, and Timberlake—sharing a scene for the first time! In all seriousness, JT's performance is low-key and decent. Nothing special, mind you, but never distracting, and definitely beats Mariah Carey in Glitter. And if you're not a fan, he does get the shit beaten out of him—yet another reason to rent.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez recommends a melodrama with honesty.

Like many Iranian movies, Bahman Ghobadi's beautiful and passionate A Time for Drunken Horses focuses its poignant narrative on children, a device some critics consider excessively manipulative, but which Ghobadi handles with honesty and an admirable restraint. The film follows a family of orphaned Kurdish siblings living in brutal conditions in the border between Iran and Iraq. Ayoub, the film's young hero, and his sisters make back-breaking sacrifices to support each other and their disabled older brother, Madi.

Their already difficult lives take a turn for the worst when a doctor reveals that Madi is critically ill and needs an operation to survive. His siblings become determined to raise the money in whatever way they can — Ameneh, an elder sister, agrees to marry an Iraqi Kurd if they agree to pay for Madi's operation (the groom's family eventually refuses, offering them a donkey they can sell instead). But Ayoub's dangerous struggles form the heart of the film, as he attempts to raise money transporting contraband goods with a group of ineffective smugglers. The film's enigmatic title is also the film's most absurd and potent image, referring to the smugglers' practice of spiking their mules' water with vodka, so they can endure journeys on freezing mine-infested fields and mountains.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez shows us the Way.

Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a bizarre but very watchable melting pot of ancient spiritualism, gangster references, urban decay and RZA's predictably infectious soundtrack. Forest Whitaker stars as yet another off-beat and enigmatic character, a bird-loving hit man named Ghost Dog who lives by ancient Samurai codes. He gives a fascinating performance due to Whitaker's ability to express the concentration, agility and exactness of a samurai despite his hulking stature and a mere handful of lines. Perfectly capturing what is most interesting about Jarmusch's movies, he mixes things that have very little to do with each other to produce interesting but somewhat absurd results.

The story centers on Ghost Dog's relentless protection of Louie, a mobster who once saved Ghost Dog's life. However, after a series of complicated misadventures, Louie's gang turns against the modern day samurai and the film focuses on Ghost Dog's day-to-day survival and sense of duty. The storyline has its merits and surprises, but the film is more interesting for its many eccentricities, such as Ghost Dog's bizarre camaraderie with his best-friend - an ice cream seller who doesn't understand a word that Ghost Dog is saying as he only speaks French — or his pseudo-philosophical conversations with the precocious Pearline, a young girl who carries children books, pulp paperbacks and The Souls of Black Folk in her lunch box. Jarmusch has made many admirable movies, but, like Night on Earth and Dead Man, Ghost Dog stands out for its cleverness, hypnotic beauty and dark humor.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez indulges a distaste for linear narrative.

Chinese director Jia Zhangke's fourth film The World is set almost entirely in the Beijing World Park, an Epcot-like expanse filled with unconvincing counterfeits of famous landmarks. The irony is almost unbearably biting for the park's many workers - they can stroll from The Eiffel Tower to the Sphinx in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette, but have close to zero actual mobility. Most of the workers moved to the city from impoverished provinces, while the rest are Russian dancers who have their passports confiscated upon their arrival. Jia's captivating film, both weirdly focused and meandering, traces the harsh realism and occasional optimism of lives going nowhere fast.

Jia has structured the film as a winding series of disconnected, arbitrary episodes almost like short narratives in their own right, the best of which are immediate but wordless in imparting their importance. A botched attempt at sex between the film's protagonist, Tao, and her boyfriend gives us all the necessary insight to their messy relationship, while the scenes involving Tao's friendship with Anna, one of the Russian dancers, despite their language barrier, manage to eclipse the film's overall sadness.

Like most of Jia's movies, The World is clearly about the illusion of possibility in an increasingly globalized world, but thankfully it never comes across as needlessly preachy or apocalyptic. Using understated film techniques alongside bizarre acid-trip animations and MTV-style visual overload, The World has a strange but winning after-effect that is part magic, part alienation.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez recommends we find our inner music-lover.

Micheal Haneke's Caché was probably last year's best film, an engaging anti-thriller about repressed personal and national guilt. However, it was not the first time Haneke had confronted his audience with universal ethical dilemmas. In movies such as Funny Games and Code Inconnu, Haneke had been experimenting with violence against the spectator, criticizing our tendencies to be complicit with the director's manipulations and our passive absorption in narrative. But it is with his excellent 2000 film, The Piano Teacher, that these interrogations began to develop more maturely. Starring the exceptional actress, Isabelle Huppert, in a performance that makes any acting before it seem like amateur mimicry (I exaggerate, naturally) and based on the novel of Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher was a gripping and sadistic exploration of perversity, the idealist's latent capacity for violence and the refusal of seduction.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez recommends a película and gives justification for enjoying Almodóvar.

It's always good to start the year with a film both iconic and obvious, and Almodovar's 1998 All About My Mother is both a classic of the college-dorm-poster variety and obligatory watching for anyone remotely interested in European cinema of the past twenty years. On the surface, All About My Mother is a melodrama about a nurse who copes with her teenage son's death by returning to Barcelona in search of the boy's father. But with Almodovar things are never to be taken purely at face value, and this film is more accurately about the history of spectatorship, the imaging of gender, the celebration of the peripheral and the interplay between art and life.

Of course, the subtexts within this movie, however complex, can be readily decoded by even the least precocious of teenagers, which has not prevented some of the country's most well-regarded critics from publishing rather short-sighted misreadings of Almodovar's film as merely camp and politically complacent. Micheal Atkinson from The Voice, for instance, calls it "as unrebellious a film as one could imagine coming from a once- terrible enfant ... [its] womb-like warmth and post-camp bathos has only led him to more conservative areas." Such a critique betrays the all too prevalent mentality among American critics that directors who happen to be minorities have to entertain a usually insipid and literalist approach to socially committed art. But Almodovar is too sophisticated and mature a director to engage in the bourgeois-titilating shock theatrics for which Atkinson mystifyingly advocates. In its visually breathtaking engagement with the over-arching discourse surrounding a broad gamut of identities, All About My Mother's quiet subversions have an ultimately greater resonance than any sort of didactic allegory.

In which Blue and White film savant Iggy Cortez gives you another reason to love the French. This week's selection is Read My Lips.

If you, like many Columbia students, are waiting until the very last moment to fill out your tax returns, Jacques Audiard's smart yet entertaining thriller-cum-noir, Read My Lips should provide both fun escapism from stress yet abundant incentive not to mess with money matters.

In which Blue and White house cineaste Iggy Cortez advises you on how to impress the discerning Kim's clerks. Also look for Iggy's thoughts on a newly updated biography of Italian great Federico Fellini in the Spring Books issue of The Blue and White, forthcoming imminently. This week's selection is Red.

Walter Reade Theater is screening an almost complete retrospective of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema. And while it would be a shame not to catch these films on the big screen, most of us lack the student budget to see all three installments of the "Three Colors" trilogy, much as we don't possess the spare time to watch each "commandment" from his "Decalogue" during the heart of seminar-paper season.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez gives you something to watch this weekend when you ask the cute girl from CC to your room to "watch a movie."

What Time is it There? is Tsai-Ming Liang's powerful exploration of loneliness and loss, themes he has explored previously in such modern classics as the bleak The River and the poignantly whimsical pseudo-musical The Hole. But while Tsai's humanist concerns, and his cast of favorite actors, recur in all his movies, each film is inflected with its particular share of symbols and obsessions as to make them wholly independent worlds of their own.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez gives you something to watch if even a trip on the 1, 2, or 3 seems too much.

A friend of mine recently said he couldn't think of any great contemporary directors, and to contemporary cinema's defense the first (out of many) names that came to mind was that of Arnaud Desplechin. His enigmatic masterpiece, Kings and Queen, released last May in New York, was the best movie of the year: not quite a comedy, not quite a drama — yet oddly greater than the two.

While the title of his 1996 movie, My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument suggests it is one of those witty but trivial farces about the anxieties of youth, it possesses an uncanny power and introverted intelligence we have come to expect from only the best of dramas. The film should resonate particularly well with Columbia students faced with the reality of life after college, and the very real possibility of life failing the enormous expectations we romantically demand from it.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez tells you what to watch on Oscar's eve.

Joining the ranks of Fellini and Kurosawa, Robert Altman will receive a life-time achievement award during this year's Academy Awards. Although the Oscar's prestige has considerably diminished in the past few years, Altman's recognition should be universally lauded, as he is arguably the best living American director and certainly one of the most consistently inventive. He has a rare gift of both exploiting the potential of the genre movie while subverting it from within. Because face it, no matter what enjoyment you may get from a Western or Noir, if performed unimaginatively, the genre movie is the ultimate platform for reifying roles, presenting moments that may shine on their own, but that collectively impose a certain oppressive system of belief. Out of all his movies, Gosford Park is certainly one of the best and also one of the most misunderstood, particularly by supposed cinephiles who rather stupidly dismiss it as an exercise in glamour, disregarding its aesthetic profundity simply because Altman does not perform existential back-flips and pirouettes.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez tells you how to spend your weekend. Find previous installments here and here.

Columbia students may have forgotten the glory of Fridays with their Thursday night weekends, but universally Friday night is the space for unwinding, allowing a certain exuberance away from weekly monotony. Claire Denis runs away with Friday's metaphorical possibilities in this voluptuously beautiful anti-narrative of a young woman whose one-night stand represents both a last dance to the single-life and, contrary to what our over-structured weeks would lead us think, an acknowledgment of life's possibilities for transformation.

While it is simplistic to make crude generalizations of French versus American film codes, one can only imagine what Friday Night would have become in the hands of a hip American indie director; if it took place in New York instead of Paris, and its taciturn ambiguity were replaced by sharp conversation and analyses of motivations. The result, while probably beautiful and engaging, would stand against everything that makes Friday Night so successful. The film is minimalist, stingy with conversation and gladly lacking in narrative cinema's obsession with character development. And yet this dream-like film isn't austerely conceptual, on the contrary it ranks amongst Denis most unabashedly aesthetic. Languorously beautiful, it ranks as Denis' most accessible, and openly seductive work. Although not as defined an auteurial perspective as Beau Travail, it is equally rewarding. Like the perfect one night stand it is anonymous, vivid in details, intelligent but uncomplicated, and unconcerned with post-coital ramifications.

In which film savant Iggy Cortez gives you something to watch this weekend when you ask the cute girl from CC to your room to "watch a movie."

After the decidedly uneven Swimming Pool, with 5X2 François Ozon makes a triumphant return to form with a film that is playfully sardonic but also unapologetically moving. Intelligent, irreverent and beautiful to look at; in the best possible way, it fulfills the fantasy Frenchness has for the precocious (and pretentious) at Columbia.