Sextette (1978)

SEXTETTE  (1978)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Ken Hughes

    Mae West, Timothy Dalton, Tony Curtis,

    Dom DeLouise, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton,

    Walter Pidgeon, George Raft, Regis Philbin

A famous actress with an anachronistic wardrobe and a familiar purr in her voice checks into a London hotel for her honeymoon, but the demands of stardom and the attentions of numerous men conspire to keep her away from the bridal suite. Like some other legendarily godawful films, Mae West's last movie isn't necessarily as bad as its reputation. But it's still pretty bad. West was 83 when she made it, and numerous takes and some artful editing were required to cover for her inability to hit her marks and remember her lines. For all that, she pretty much pulls it off. She might look like some drag queen's grandmother, but she's still Mae West, the grand dame of sexual innuendo, inviting the boys to come up and see her sometime. It's an act nobody else could get away with. Beyond that, the picture's a mess, a jumble of campy cameos, ghastly musical numbers and gags that just don't fly. A geriatric curtain call for a cultural icon who maybe stayed in the game too long, but couldn't do or be anything else.

Hugo (2011)

HUGO  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Martin Scorsese

    Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz,

    Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer,

    Helen McCrory, Ray Winstone, Jude Law,

    Richard Griffiths, Michal Stuhlberg, Frances de la Tour

An inventive kid living in the clockworks of a railroad station in 1930s Paris tries to repair a treasured museum piece - a mechanical man - which leads him to an old shopkeeper, the all-but-forgotten filmmaker Georges Méliès. This is Martin Scorsese's valentine to silent film, and he goes way back, to the Lumière brothers and that late-19th-century shot of the train pulling into the station. There's the shot of the two men dancing, and the shot from "The Great Train Robbery" of the outlaw firing his revolver into the camera, and, of course, there's Méliès. The kids' adventure story line is a departure for Scorsese, but it's unmistakably his work, a movie-lover's movie for the ages. It's action-crammed opening reel might be a little too busy, and some of the side characters and subplots barely get a chance to register, but if Scorsese's ambition sometimes exceeds what the script can grasp, who cares? His passion for the medium and its history is infectious, and the movie looks great, an amber-and-sepia journey back in time, and a tribute to the spirit of invention and magic that made cinema possible in the first place. The line connecting Méliès and Scorsese isn't such a long one, after all.

Previous Scobie Award Winners: Best Picture

The Scobie Awards don't really exist, which doesn't matter much, because to date no Scobie winner has ever turned up to collect one. The Movie Buzzard does not expect that trend to change. The first Scobies were published 24 years ago in a DIY film annual called Flashback. For the record, here are the previous winners in the best picture category:

               1988: "The Moderns"

               1989: "Sidewalk Stories"

               1990: "The Civil War"

               1991: "Thelma & Louise"

               1992: "Unforgiven"

               1993: "Schindler's List"

               1994: "Natural Born Killers"

               1995: "The Usual Suspects"

               1996: "Lone Star"

               1997: "Brassed Off"

               1998: "Pleasantville"

               1999: "Run Lola Run"

               2000: "Ghost Dog"

               2001: "Amelie"

               2002: "Gangs of New York"

               2003: "Mystic River"

               2004: "Control Room"

               2005: "Good Night, And Good Luck"

               2006: "Linda Linda Linda"

               2007: "Atonement"

               2008: "Milk"

               2009: "In the Loop"

               2010: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

The 2011 Scobie Awards

The Scobie Awards are named after Herman Scobie, a World War Two veteran and free-lance soldier of fortune who died under mysterious circumstances in a Paris hotel room in 1963. (See "Charade".)

Here are the Scobie Award winners for 2011:

Picture: "Hugo"

Actress: Eva Green, "Cracks"

Actor: André Wilms, "Le Havre"

Supporting Actress: Maibritt Saerens, "Happy, Happy"

Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill, "Moneyball"

Ensemble: "The Way Back"

Cameo: Martin Scorsese, "Hugo"

Director: Woody Allen, "Midnight In Paris"

Cinematography: Marcus Waterloo, "Black Field"

Musical Score: Sylvain Chomet, "The Illusionist"

Foreign Language Film: "Baarìa"

B Movie: "The Woman"

Documentary: "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

Revival: "Playtime"

Title Sequence: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Trailer: "Red Cliff"

Print Ad: "Griff the Invisible"

Career Achievement Award: Lily Tomlin

Behind Locked Doors (1948)

BEHIND LOCKED DOORS  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Oscar Boetticher

    Richard Carlson, Lucille Bremer, Douglas Fowley,

    Ralf Harolde, Thomas Browne Henry, Tor Johnson

Efficiently paced, no-frills thriller about a private eye who has himself checked into a mental institution to investigate the disappearance of a crooked judge. There's got to be an easier way for a gumshoe to make $5,000. Mighty Tor Johnson plays one of the inmates. Oscar (Budd) Boetticher went on to direct a series of highly acclaimed westerns starring Randolph Scott.

Magic Trip (2011)

MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY'S SEARCH FOR A KOOL PLACE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney

Postcards from the edge. There are few things more quintessentially American than a road trip, and it's safe to say there was never a road trip quite like the acid-fueled cross-country journey Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took in 1964 in a psychedelic school bus, with Kesey orchestrating the fun and games and Neal Cassady speeding along behind the wheel. This documentary captures some of what went on back then, but it's a scattershot account and the effect is a little like watching an old home movie of somebody else's party. The magic of the moment can never be recreated, with film or anything else, and whatever cosmic insight these people thought they were pulling out of the smoke-filled air, their personal foibles and romantic entanglements are as mundane as anybody else's. Still, they did all manage to be on board for one of the more celebrated side trips of the 1960s. That must've been one hell of a bus ride.

O. Henry's Full House (1952)

O. HENRY'S FULL HOUSE  (1952)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King,

         Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco

    Charles Laughton, David Wayne, Marilyn Monroe,

    Dale Robertson, Richard Widmark, Gregory Ratoff,

    Anne Baxter, Jean Peters, Fred Allen,

    Jeanne Crain, Farley Granger, Oscar Levant

Five short films based on O. Henry stories, introduced by John Steinbeck. In "The Cop and the Anthem", Charles Laughton tries to get himself arrested, hoping to spend a comfortable three months in jail. In "The Clarion Call", Richard Widmark's a hoodlum and Dale Robertson's a straight-arrow cop. (Widmark's nasal laugh signals his presence before you even see him.) In "The Last Leaf", an avant-garde painter (Gregory Ratoff) switches to realism, inspired by a girl who appears to be dying. In "The Ransom of Red Chief", Fred Allen and Oscar Levant play con men whose hare-brained kidnapping scheme goes wrong at every turn. In "The Gift of the Magi", Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger exchange Christmas presents. You might guess where most of the stories are going before they get there, but that's part of the fun. Irony was O. Henry's stock in trade. He was a master at it.