A Wonderful Night In Split (2004)

A WONDERFUL NIGHT IN SPLIT  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arsen Anton Ostojic

    Coolio, Marija Skaricic, Dino Dvornik,

    Mladen Vulic, Vicko Bilandzic, Nives Ivankovic

As the clock ticks down on New Year's Eve, a sailor on shore leave and a teenaged junkie share a moment of despair. A drug dealer pays the price for a deal gone bad. And two young lovers look for a place to hook up before the stroke of midnight. Three loosely connected stories, all set in the same two-hour time frame in the Croatian port city of Split, strikingly shot in shadowy, blue-tinted black and white. The irony of the title is inescapable. What happens to these characters is anything but wonderful. But there's an underlying fatalism at work that makes the stories morbidly compelling. It's like watching a slow-motion train wreck: You're not sure you ought to, and you're not sure you want to, but you still can't quite look away.

A Shot In the Dark (1964)

A SHOT IN THE DARK  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Blake Edwards

    Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, George Sanders,

    Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Tracy Reed,

    Andre Maranne, Graham Stark, Turk Thrust

Inspector Jacques Clouseau tries to solve a murder, falling out of windows, walking into walls, battling a rack of belligerent pool cues, and bravely struggling to maintain his composure while skulking through a nudist camp with Elke Sommer. Chief Inspector Dreyfus, meanwhile, stabs himself with a letter opener, amputates his thumb with a miniature guillotine, and kills ten people in a futile attempt to assassinate Clouseau. Nobody mixed slapstick and sadism with more comic glee than Blake Edwards, and nobody ever pronounced words like "moth" and "bump" quite like Inspector Clouseau. The first "Pink Panther" sequel, and one of the best.

Blake Edwards

(1922-2010)

Salt (2010)

SALT  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Phillip Noyce

    Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor

    Daniel Olbrychski, August Diehl, Hunt Block

With her pencil-thin frame and killer lips, Angelina Jolie sprints into action as Evelyn Salt, a CIA op who may also be a Russian mole. It starts out with Angie in her underwear being tortured by the North Koreans, and ends with her, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's an old-school, Cold War setup tossed into the 21st century, as if the spy game that started way back when had taken on a life of its own. It's not even clear what these people think they're fighting for, but it's the only game they know. Angelina could be a double agent, or a triple or quadruple one. It's hard to tell, and it hardly matters. The movie's like a cartoon: It moves real fast, the action never lets up, and the stunts are as preposterous as the odds that our heroine could survive them without breaking every bone in her body. At the risk of giving too much away, let's just say that by the end of the film, Jason Bourne's not the only lethal undercover agent at large in the land. Evelyn Salt is out there, too.

Comfort and Joy (1984)

COMFORT AND JOY  (1984)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Forsyth

    Bill Paterson, Eleanor David, Alex Norton

A Glasgow disc jockey, despondent after being dumped by his girlfriend just before Christmas, stumbles into an unlikely turf war between rival mobile ice-cream franchises. An amusing, low-key comedy from Scotland's Bill Forsyth, the guy who made "Local Hero". If you're in the market for a holiday movie that's mostly good-natured, slightly daft and not too killingly sentimental, check it out.

Constantine (2005)

CONSTANTINE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Francis Lawrence

    Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton,

    Djimon Hounsou, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Peter Stormare

A mixed-up supernatural thriller starring Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, a chain-smoking demon hunter who's dying of lung cancer after successfully killing himself once before. For reasons the film tries not too successfully to explain, John's still out prowling the night streets of L.A. as a kind of middleman in a war between angels and demons for control of the earth. To call Reeves' acting wooden would be to understate the dramatic potential of wood, and Rachel Weisz as the psychic cop he teams up with seems to have cornered the market on severe. As if to compensate, Peter Stormare as Lucifer goes way the hell over the top, but when you're playing the Prince of Darkness, maybe that's allowed. Which leaves Tilda Swinton as the devious, beguiling angel Gabriel, who could be on one side or the other, it's anybody's guess, but at least she's interesting to watch. Tilda Swinton as a butch angel. Why couldn't they give Keanu the seven-minute cameo and turn the rest of the movie over to her? Damn.

Movie Star Moment: Clark Gable

Clark Gable as Peter Warne

in "It Happened One Night" (1934)

    This happens during the famous hitchhiking scene. Gable and Claudette Colbert are stranded on the side of an empty country road, hoping to catch a ride somewhere. Gable tries out a variety of hitchhiking techniques and fails, so Colbert says, "Mind if I try?" Gable, who's picking at a carrot, says, "You? Don't make me laugh!" Listen to the way he delivers the line. Now imagine Bugs Bunny delivering the same line. Bugs would do it the same way, exactly. The animators who created Bugs Bunny even claimed that their cartoon rabbit was based on Gable's performance in "It Happened One Night". If you were going to make a case for that, Gable's dismissive response to this perceived threat to his manhood would be exhibit A. Plus, Bugs and Gable both had really big ears.

The Movie Buzzard thanks Marsha Lebby for her help tracking down the Clark Gable/Bugs Bunny connection.

Clark Gable: Tall, Dark and Handsome (1996)

CLARK GABLE: TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME 

    D: Susan F. Walker                                    (1996)  ¢ ¢ ¢

Even in an era of legendary leading men, Clark Gable stood out. Nobody else could match his cocksure bravado and easy, swaggering charm. Cooper, Tracy, Stewart and Fonda all had a sensitive side that Gable was probably wise not to attempt. Cagney and Bogart had a psychotic side that Gable (usually) lacked. Powell and Grant were more sophisticated, and Flynn could match Gable's rakishness, but they all seemed light on their feet. (Flynn was the perfect Robin Hood. Now try to picture Gable in tights. See?) Gable's characters were unrepentant sinners, brash and world-wise and full of themselves. If they reformed at all, it wasn't till the last reel, often the last minute. If Gable seems dated now, it's partly because there was never anybody else like him. He was the guy who could get any woman he wanted, love her as long as he wanted, maybe knock her around a little and then drop her cold, leaving her wanting more. Because Gable, to steal his most famous line, didn't give a damn. Which is all just a long-winded lead-up to saying that this is a documentary about Clark Gable, no better or worse than most other movie-star documentaries, worth tuning in for the film clips, at least. Then you might want to check out "The Misfits", or "It Happened One Night", or "Red Dust". Hollywood wouldn't be Hollywood without Clark Gable.

San Francisco (1936)

SAN FRANCISCO  (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: W.S. Van Dyke II

    Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald,

    Spencer Tracy, Jack Holt

Gable plays a saloonkeeper, the fast-talking owner of the hottest joint on the Barbary Coast. MacDonald plays a songbird from Colorado, who can knock out an aria or a music-hall tune with equal facility. Tracy plays the neighborhood priest, Gable's boyhood pal from the streets. So Jeanette walks into Gable's place looking for work and he hires her, but she'd really rather sing opera. But Gable gets her under contract and won't let her go, and besides, he's kind of taken a fancy to her, but she resists, and Tracy keeps turning up to offer spiritual guidance and to keep her from showing her legs on the stage of Gable's saloon, and then there's this earthquake. Nobody knew how to make art serve commerce like the guys who ran MGM in the '30s, and this is a crowd-pleasing example of that, topped off with the kind of sanctimonious overkill that only MGM in the '30s could get away with. The earthquake effects look real good for 1936.

Serenity (2005)

SERENITY  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joss Whedon

    Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Adam Baldwin,

    Summer Glau, Alan Tudyk, Jewel Staite,

    Sean Maher, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nectar Rose

"Serenity" traces its origin to a short-lived cult television show called "Firefly", so it seems likely that fans of the TV show will know more about what's going on here than the rest of us. On its own, it's a good, little ($40 million) B movie, ripped off from "Star Wars" and a dozen other sources, about the crew of a freelance merchant spacecraft who reluctantly take on the protection of a telepathic girl who's being hunted down by an assassin on behalf of a repressive interplanetary government. There's more to it than that, but not enough to get in the way of all the spaceship chases and gun battles and fist fights and things blowing up and stuff. The characters speak an arcane jargon that occasionally slips into something like Chinese, and there's a bantering camaraderie among the crew that suggests relationships partly formed in previous episodes, to be filled out in later ones. It's a movie that seems completely at ease with its modest aspirations, smart enough to hold your attention and goofy enough to keep you entertained. Hey, ya know what? It'd make a great television show.

The Flim-Flam Man (1967)

THE FLIM-FLAM MAN  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Irvin Kershner

    George C. Scott, Michael Sarrazin, Sue Lyon,

    Harry Morgan, Alice Ghostley, Slim Pickens

A rambling, back-roads comedy about an old grifter (George C. Scott) and a young Army deserter (Michael Sarrazin) who team up to work a series of scams in the small-town South. One of Scott's rare laid-back performances (Note the W.C. Fields twang), and Sarrazin's first starring role (Whatever happened to him?). Lolita plays Sarrazin's love interest.

Irvin Kershner

(1923-2010)

Men With Brooms (2002)

MEN WITH BROOMS  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Gross

    Paul Gross, Molly Parker, Michelle Nolden,

    Peter Outerbridge, James Allodi, Leslie Nielsen

Paul Gross reaches deep into the bag of sports-movie cliches and comes up with this north-of-the-border comedy about a small-town curling team seeking redemption as it competes for the coveted Golden Broom. A ragged, good-natured spoof with a distinctly Canadian edge. Watch out for the beavers, eh?

Leslie Nielsen

(1926-2010)

Where Eagles Dare (1968)

WHERE EAGLES DARE  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Brian G. Hutton

    Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure,

    Michael Hordern, Patrick Wymark, Anton Diffring,

    Donald Houston, Ingrid Pitt, Derren Nesbitt

Equipped with enough dynamite to level Austria and enough ammo to wipe out the German army, Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood stage a commando assault on a heavily fortified castle high in the Alps. An action-packed World War Two adventure with a plot that's complex to the point of self-parody. There are double agents and triple agents, and nobody seems to know what the hell's going on except Burton, whose straight-faced performance could be either tossed-off or tongue-in-cheek, and is probably a little of both. You can't take it seriously for a second, but as guilty pleasures go, it's a great one, for its sheer preposterousness, its star power, its stunt work, and the record-breaking amount of ordnance involved.

Ingrid Pitt

(1937-2010)

Freeze Me (2000)

FREEZE ME  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Takashi Ishii

    Harumi Inoue, Shingo Tsurumi, Kazuki Kitamura

A young woman moves to Tokyo after being gang-raped. Five years later, her attackers track her down and come back for more. She disposes of them one by one, and puts the bodies in cold storage in industrial-sized freezers in her apartment. A deranged Japanese thriller, funny in a real dark way, like some creepy, dreamy Hitchcock version of "I Spit On Your Grave". The people I saw it with thought the woman jumped off the balcony at the end, but I'd like to think she ran off to Europe and lived happily ever after as a technical assistant on Lucio Fulci movies. It's the romantic in me.

The Cassandra Crossing (1977)

THE CASSANDRA CROSSING  (1977)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: George Pan Cosmatos

    Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster,

    Ava Gardner, Martin Sheen, Lee Strasberg,

    Ingrid Thulin, O.J. Simpson, Alida Valli,

    Lionel Stander, John Phillip Law

Train of fools. An all-star disaster thriller in which the usual cross-section of humanity settles in for the railroad journey from Geneva to Stockholm, not knowing that among them is a terrorist carrying pneumonic plague. Will Dr. Richard Harris find a way to contain the disease? Or will Col. Burt Lancaster send them all to their deaths by letting the train cross an unsafe bridge? And is the Rev. O.J. Simpson really dedicated to doing the Lord's work, or is he up to something else? It'll take two hours and seven minutes to find out. I bet the suspense is killing you.

Green Zone (2010)

GREEN ZONE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Greengrass

    Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson,

    Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, Igal Naor

In a story ripped from yesterday's headlines, Matt Damon plays Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a skilled career soldier stuck with the frustrating job of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. As the sites he's checking out keep turning up empty, it becomes clear to Miller that the intelligence he's getting is just no good. When his superiors up the chain of command give him the runaround, he gets suspicious and does a little investigating on his own. Where Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" was scrupulously apolitical, this movie dives right into the politics of the war to tell its story. The result is an intense, fast-paced action thriller, escapist entertainment that actually leaves you with something to think about. In the gallery of corrupt and compromised characters, the stand-ins for Judith Miller and Achmed Chalabi are hard to miss.

River of No Return (1954)

RIVER OF NO RETURN  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Otto Preminger

    Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe,

    Rory Calhoun, Tommy Rettig

When Rory Calhoun steals Robert Mitchum's horse, Mitchum and Monroe take off in pursuit, riding a log raft down a white-water river. Monroe's voluptuous, Calhoun's villainous, Mitchum's rugged, and the back-projected forests, mountains and rivers of Alberta look almost as good as Monroe. It's not what you'd call frontier realism, but who cares?

Bamboozled (2000)

BAMBOOZLED  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Spike Lee

    Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett-Smith,

    Michael Rappaport, Tommy Davidson, Mos Def

Spike Lee's ferocious black-face satire about an African-American television producer who develops a turn-of-the-millennium minstrel show, and what happens when the show becomes a runaway hit. Lee pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, just seizes everything he can grab from America's racist cultural past and slaps you upside the head with it. And he has the artistry to pull it off. Savagely funny and, if you'll excuse the expression, extremely dark.

Häxan/Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

HAXAN/WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES 
    D: Benjamin Christensen                  (1922)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Maren Pederson, Elith Pio, Benjamin Christensen

A groundbreaking Swedish documentary (at least it's in the style of a documentary) about witchcraft and devil worship from ancient times to the 20th century. Disturbing, irreverent and technically accomplished, with moments of tongue-in-cheek humor and Christensen himself cast as a tongue-flicking devil. There's a spooky authenticity about some of the subjects - toothless crones who could've stepped straight out of 19th-century photographs - that's as haunting as anything else in the film. Two excellent prints of the movie - one with titles and the other narrated by William S. Burroughs - are available on a DVD from Criterion.

Alexander (2004)

ALEXANDER  (2004)  ¢ ¢

    D: Oliver Stone

    Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer,

    Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins,

    Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Alexander the Great conquers Asia, but neither Oliver Stone nor Colin Farrell can get a handle on Alexander. A big, long, slow-moving epic with a lot of arch dialogue and Farrell as the bleached-blond conqueror looking like a young surfer dude or an outcast from a metal band, depending on what phase of Alexander's life he's trying to portray. For all the information and speculation packed into Stone's script, you never get a coherent sense of what Alexander was really about, and Farrell has neither the capacity to make you care, nor the charisma to make you believe he could lead an army to the ends of the earth. The romantic angle is interesting, though. While Alexander clearly has a taste for both oysters and snails, his most enduring emotional attachment is with another man. Not that he and Hephaistion (Jared Leto) actually get it on. They exchange meaningful looks and long, lingering hugs, but it's Rosario Dawson as Roxane who gets the nude love scene. In fact, there are only two significant female characters: Roxane and Olympias (Angelina Jolie), Alexander's snake-charming mother. Both are manipulative ballbreakers, something that probably says more about Stone than it does about Alexander. Anthony Hopkins, safely removed from the proceedings, narrates the story as Ptolemy, padding around his palace in Egypt 40 years after the great man's death.

We're Not Dressing (1934)

WE'RE NOT DRESSING  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Norman Taurog

    Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard,

    George Burns, Gracie Allen, Ethel Merman,

    Leon Errol, Ray Milland

Bing, a boat, a bear, a babe and a beach. The babe is Carole Lombard, who owns the bear and the boat. Bing's a sailor, and when the boat goes down, they all wash up on the beach. Burns and Allen do some fast-talking funny stuff. Leon Errol and Ethel Merman cut the rug. There's a new song about every eight minutes, to keep you from being distracted by the plot. Musical highlight: Bing singing "Love Thy Neighbor". 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO  (2009)

     D: Niels Arden Oplev                                        ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

     Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,

     Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Haber, Ingvar Hirdwall

A journalist facing a prison term for libel and a punk computer hacker with some bad personal demons team up to investigate an unsolved murder case from 40 years ago. A dark and often disturbing Swedish thriller based on Stieg Larsson's zillion-copy bestseller. The material might be pulp, but it's stylish, irresistible pulp, hard to turn away from, even when its characters are just drinking coffee (which they do a lot), or when real bad things are happening (and believe me, bad things happen). Nyqvist, playing star magazine writer Mikael Blomqvist, has the weary, seen-it-all look of a reporter who has lived for years on deadlines and adrenalin, knows a good story when he sees one, and knows how to get the facts to tell it. As the pierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, Rapace may or may not be the girl Larsson had in mind, but she can't be too far off. A chain-smoking snarl in jeans and black leather, Salander's one of the least forgettable characters in recent fiction, brilliant, inscrutable, pathologically antisocial and seriously fucked up, and Rapace doesn't miss any of that. Like Larsson's book, the film is about its characters as much as the story they're in, and it leaves you feeling glad to have made their acquaintance, with two sequels based on other Larsson novels still to come.

The Blues Brothers (1980)

THE BLUES BROTHERS  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Landis

    Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Cab Calloway,

    John Candy, Carrie Fisher, Henry Gibson,

    Steve Lawrence, Charles Napier, Kathleen Freeman

Driving a recycled squad car and decked out in their trademark black suits, black hats and sunglasses, Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues set out on a mission from God: to put their old band back together and land a gig that will save the gloomy Catholic school they grew up in from closing down. By the time they reach the arena, a gang of Nazis, a redneck country band, Jake's furious ex-girlfriend and the entire Chicago police force are out to kill them. The "Saturday Night Live" routine that inspired this was always a double-edged joke, the setup being that two of the whitest white guys in the universe were singing soul music, and the kicker being that they were getting away with it. The boys knock off a few numbers here, too, while leaving the best musical moments to the real pros - Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker. The rest of the picture is big, loud, broadly played mayhem, working on the theory that if destroying a cop car is funny, destroying 100 cop cars will be 100 times as funny. (Strangely, in this case, it's true.) The best Chicago movie ever.

The Wolfman (2010)

THE WOLFMAN  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joe Johnston

    Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt,

    Hugo Weaving, Geraldine Chaplin, Antony Sher

In this take on the old werewolf story, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is a prominent 19th-century actor who returns to the decaying family estate after a long absence to investigate the violent death of his brother. It seems brother Ben was out walking on the moor one night - under a full moon, of course - when he was ripped to shreds by some monstrous beast. Del Toro's Lawrence is the brooding type to begin with (just like Lon Chaney Jr. in the 1941 version), and when the monster in question attacks him, too, well, let's just say it doesn't improve his disposition. The story expands on Curt Siodmak's original screenplay, and that's not an improvement, either. There's nothing going on here you can't see coming a mile away. When a doctor brings poor Larry into a lecture hall strapped to a wheelchair, to prove to his colleagues that nothing will happen when the full moon breaks overhead, what do you think's going to happen? It does. Del Toro's effectively cast as the tormented protagonist, and Emily Blunt, apparently on loan from the set of "The Young Victoria", looks great as Ben's (and Larry's) love interest. An impressively aging Geraldine Chaplin plays the gypsy woman who can see what others can't, and Anthony Hopkins cackles and purrs as Larry's domineering father, who's hiding a terrible secret of his own. The older "Wolf Man" worked because of its narrative simplicity, shadowy atmosphere, Chaney's anguished performance and that famous lap-dissolve camerawork. This movie's noisier, bloodier, more elaborate and more technically advanced. But it's not a better film.

That's Carry On (1977)

THAT'S CARRY ON  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Sid James,

    Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Cribbins,

    Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, Jim Dale,

    Esma Cannon, Eric Barker, Hattie Jacques,

    Leslie Phillips, Percy Herbert, Elke Sommer,

    Shirley Eaton, Phil Silvers, Juliet Mills

Hail, hail, the gang's all here. A compilation of highlight clips from the "Carry On" films, a series of blatantly silly ensemble comedies that kept Britain in stitches from the 1950s through the 1970s. There's no real U.S. equivalent to the "Carry On" movies, and this is as good an introduction to what they're about as you're likely to get. Series regulars Barbara Windsor and Kenneth Williams introduce the clips, and a running gag has Williams stuck in the projection booth while desperately needing to make a trip to the loo. That's "Carry On".

The Naked Edge

Annette Bening in "The Grifters"

Jodie Foster in "Nell"

Holly Hunter in "Thirteen"

Nastassja Kinski in "To the Devil a Daughter"

Sissy Spacek in "Carrie"

Emily Mortimer in "Lovely & Amazing"

Maggie Gyllenhaal in "Secretary"

Diane Keaton in "Something's Gotta Give"

Debra Winger in "The Sheltering Sky"

Misty Mundae in "Play-Mate of the Apes"

When Will I Be Loved (2004)

WHEN WILL I BE LOVED  (2004)  ¢ 1/2

    D: James Toback

    Neve Campbell, Frederick Weller, Dominic Chianese,

    Karen Allen, Lori Singer, Mike Tyson

The first time you see Neve Campbell in this, she's taking a shower. It's right at the beginning of the movie, and the shots of Neve taking a shower are intercut with shots of her lowlife boyfriend (Frederick Weller) trying to hustle up a deal on the streets of New York. I suppose there could be some deep metaphorical significance to that shower scene, but I was too distracted by Neve Campbell to notice. That happens sometimes. Neve's character turns out to be a spoiled rich girl with real nice clothes and a bright, new Manhattan loft, who hustles men for the fun of it. In fact, everybody in the film is hustling somebody for something, usually on the pretext that they're giving them something, or making them happy, or helping them grow as a person, which is bullshit and ought to be played for laughs, but it's not. It's just tedious, and by the end, you can't help feeling you've been hustled yourself. Still, that's a pretty nice shower scene.

Insignificance (1985)

INSIGNIFICANCE  (1985)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nicolas Roeg

    Theresa Russell, Gary Busey, Tony Curtis,

    Michael Emil, Will Sampson

Reality's all in the mind in this offbeat theater piece in which characters representing Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein and Joe McCarthy cross paths in a New York hotel room in 1954. Curtis gives one of his best performances as the slimy, Red-baiting senator, and Will Sampson does a bemused cameo as the world's tallest Indian elevator operator. The scene in which Monroe demonstrates how relativity works for Einstein is a highlight. The ending's a bit of a shock.

Tony Curtis

(1925-2010)

61* (2001)

61*  (2001)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Billy Crystal

    Barry Pepper, Thomas Jane, Richard Masur,

    Bruce McGill, Christopher McDonald, Donald Moffat,

    Jennifer Crystal Foley, Robert Joy, Michael Nouri,

    Seymour Cassel, Anthony Michael Hall, Renee Taylor

Before BALCO and Andro, before McGuire and Sosa and Bonds, there was 1961, and a mutual quest by New York Yankees outfielders Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. Mantle was the fans' favorite, a great ballplayer and chronic party animal who thrived in the spotlight. Maris was the opposite of that: a basically unassuming guy who could field well and hit for power, who became more and more unsettled as the record and the glare of public attention closed in. As a lifelong Yankees fan, Billy Crystal has a passion for the story that can't be dismissed, even if the script never deviates from what's already obvious. Pepper, who looks a lot like Maris, and Jane, who's a dead ringer for Mantle, are more than capable in the leads, and when you consider what players were being paid back then (Maris got $38,000 the year he broke the record), and the principal substances they used (beer and unfiltered Camels), you get a real sense of how the game has changed.

Alice's Restaurant (1969)

ALICE'S RESTAURANT  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arthur Penn

    Arlo Guthrie, Pat Quinn, James Broderick,

    Michael McClanathan, Geoff Outlaw, Tina Chen,

    M. Emmett Walsh, Pete Seeger, Shelley Plimpton

A late-'60s time capsule based on Arlo Guthrie's extended talking song about Alice and Ray and their restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and hippies and cops and the draft and a red Volkswagen microbus and two tons of garbage. There's almost no story, really, just a bunch of stuff that happens along the way, and not everybody who watches the movie will be able to relate to that, but Penn's hang-loose approach nicely captures an era and an attitude whose impact on the culture transcended its relatively short shelf life. Pete Seeger turns up to serenade a dying Woody Guthrie, and Shelley Plimpton sniffles her way through a brief but fetching cameo as a groupie with a head cold.

Arthur Penn

(1922-2010)

The Memory of a Killer (2003)

THE MEMORY OF A KILLER  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Erik Van Looy

    Jan Decleir, Koen De Buow, Werner De Smedt,

    Jo De Meyere, Deborah Ostrega, Patrick Descamps

An aging hit man in the early stages of Alzheimer's travels to Antwerp from Marseilles to do a job. When he learns that one of his targets is a 12-year-old girl, he refuses to carry out the assignment and instead starts tracking down his employers, working his way up the food chain and leaving behind a trail of corpses while playing cat-and-mouse with the cops. A good, tight, well-played thriller with an indelible lead performance by Jan Decleir as a man with no future and therefore nothing to lose, a brutally efficient thug-turned-death's angel, desperately clinging to what remains of his memory as he blasts his way into the twilight. Like Johnny Hallyday's bank robber in "Man On the Train", this is a guy you wouldn't necessarily want to meet up with, ever. But you don't want to see the lights go out on him, either, at least not till his last, bloody mission is accomplished.

The Old Dark House (1932)

THE OLD DARK HOUSE  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Whale

    Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart,

    Melvyn Douglas, Ernest Thesiger, Lilian Bond,

    Raymond Massey, Eva Moore, Elspeth Dudgeon

A macabre drawing-room comedy - more accurately a dining-room comedy - about some young travelers who take shelter in an old Welsh mansion on a dark and stormy night. A little creaky but still fun, with a literate script and a good cast, directed in the spirit of a Halloween prank by James ("Frankenstein") Whale. The Gloria Stuart who appears here is the same Gloria Stuart who turned up 65 years later as the elderly Rose in "Titanic".

Gloria Stuart

(1910-2010)

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID  
    D: Philip Kaufman                                  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    Cliff Robertson, Robert Duvall, Luke Askew,

    R.G. Armstrong, Donald Moffat, Dana Elcar,

    Matt Clark, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr.

Shrugging off a shot at amnesty from the Missouri state legislature, the James Gang rides north to rob a bank in Minnesota, with a railroad car full of hired guns riding after them. This covers roughly the same territory as Walter Hill's "The Long Riders", and while Jesse James is the outlaw in all the history books, the character who makes both films fun to watch is Cole Younger (David Carradine in "The Long Riders", Cliff Robertson here). Robertson's Cole is fascinated with modern technology. His favorite word, whenever he spies a new piece of machinery, is "wonderment," and a calliope, a steam-driven tractor, and a long-distance talking device just introduced by A.G. Bell all qualify as wonderments. (He's less impressed with an evolving new sport called baseball.) If Cole's got an eye on the future, Jesse's all about the past. As played by Robert Duvall, Jesse's a fanatic, still fighting the Civil War in 1876, on a mission not so much to rob banks as to kill Yankees. Cole will kill when it's called for. Jesse kills because he can. As much as an outlaw western, this is a portrait of America in the year of its centennial, specifically the rough but increasingly civilized Midwestern frontier. During an extended old-time baseball sequence that's as violent and unruly as it is extraneous to the plot, somebody tells Cole that baseball's now the country's favorite sport. Cole argues that America's favorite sport will always be shooting. Then he levels his rifle, draws a bead on a high pop-up, and blasts the ball out of the sky. The ball's ruined, and that's the end of the baseball game. Shooting wins.

King Arthur (2004)

KING ARTHUR  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Antoine Fuqua

    Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffud,

    Ray Winstone, Stellan Starsgard, Til Schweiger,

    Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen

It's the Dark Ages, and King Arthur and his knights are little more than a well-tailored band of mercenaries, conscripted by the Romans to fight the Woads, a fierce, dirty, long-haired race of barbarians in a desolate, godforsaken backwater called Britain. After 15 years of more or less nonstop killing, the guys are looking forward to retirement and safe passage back to their own pagan lands, when, wouldn't you know it, they're dispatched on a last suicidal mission north of Hadrian's Wall. This leads to a lot more killing and some of the knights don't make it, but Arthur (Clive Owen) does get it on with Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who teaches him that not all Woads lead to Wome. It's transparent storybook moviemaking, as enjoyable as it is disposable, complete with castles and catapults, broadswords and battle axes, flaming arrows fired from longbows, and nasty-looking men with knives clenched in their teeth. Highlights: Stellan Skarsgard as the Saxon chief, a tense standoff on a frozen lake, and the sporty leather harness Guinevere wears into the final battle. A guilty pleasure.

Piranha (1978)

PIRANHA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joe Dante

    Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy,

    Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele, Dick Miller,

    Belinda Belaski, Bruce Gordon, Paul Bartel

"Lost River Lake. Terror. Horror. Death. Film at eleven." A tongue-in-gill monster movie in which ravenous aquatic creatures with sharp pointed teeth are released from a secret Army research station and head downstream to the sea, chewing up campers, fishermen, water-skiers, beach bunnies and anybody else unlucky enough to get in their way. Think "Jaws" with a B-movie budget and much smaller fish. Roger Corman produced. John Sayles wrote the script and plays a small role as the sentry who gets flashed by Heather Menzies.

Kevin McCarthy

(1914-2010)

The Girl Cut In Two (2007)

THE GIRL CUT IN TWO  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Claude Chabrol

    Ludivine Sagnier, Benoit Magimel,

    Francois Berleand, Mathilda May

French psychothriller about a TV weather girl who gets involved with a kinky older novelist and an emotionally unbalanced playboy, with mostly unhappy results. Maybe she has horrible taste in men, or maybe she just makes real bad choices. Maybe shit happens, or maybe these characters just get what they deserve. Chabrol isn't being judgmental. The moral equation is up for grabs.

Claude Chabrol

(1930-2010)

What's New Pussycat? (1965)

WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT?  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: Clive Donner

    Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen,

    Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss,

    Ursula Andress, Jess Hahn, Sabine Sun

A mod, mid-'60s farce set in Paris, with O'Toole as a lecherous magazine publisher who can't help pursuing - and being pursued by - every woman he meets. Woody Allen's first film - he wrote the script and acted in it, but did not direct. It's a silly, ragged mess of a movie, but Woody's early style comes through in some of the lines and gags, and it picks up steam in the madcap final reel.

Clive Donner

(1926-2010)

Please Give (2010)

PLEASE GIVE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nicole Holofcener

    Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt,

    Sarah Steele, Amanda Peet, Ann Guilbert,

    Lois Smith, Sarah Vowell, Josh Pais

A smart ensemble comedy about some city dwellers facing issues like living and dying, guilt and infidelity, illness, old age, acne, used furniture and overpriced blue jeans. A lot of it's inconclusive. There are subplots that don't go anywhere, and not everybody's issues get resolved. The characters are imperfect and not always likeable. And somehow it hooks you anyway. You keep wanting these people to come through for each other and do the right thing. When they do, in little ways mostly, it feels like a small victory for the human race. $230 for a pair of blue jeans, though. That's too much.

"Casablanca" At the Grand Illusion

    This is a pitch.

    The coolest movie theater in Seattle is a cozy, old, hole-in-the-wall art house called the Grand Illusion, in the U District at the corner of 50th and the Ave. It's a completely independent, all-volunteer cinema, run by a bunch of people who love to watch and show films.

    To help keep the wolf from the box office door, the Grand Illusion is throwing a benefit bash with a screening of "Casablanca" on Saturday, September 25. There will be drinks and music, and reports indicate Bogart himself plans to attend. (This I gotta see.) Admission is $25, but it's for a terrific cause, and you can't go wrong with "Casablanca" on a theater screen. Doors open at 5:30 for the first show, and 8:30 for the second. Showtimes are 6:30 and 9:30. The Movie Buzzard will be there for sure.

    To find out more, go to grandillusioncinema.org.

    A personal note: The late CBS newsman Harry Reasoner once said that you never forget the girl you first saw "Casablanca" with. He was right. Here's looking at you, kid.

The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983)

THE WILD WORLD OF LYDIA LUNCH  (1983)  ¢ ¢

    D: Nick Zedd

Portrait of the artist as a young punk. Lydia Lunch rambles on about how broke and alienated she feels, while somebody follows her around with a camera. Then there's some weird music and she pushes a kid on a swing in the park and wanders around some more in a diaphanous white dress and plays with a dog and takes off on a motorcycle and smashes a mirror and hugs a dead tree and chases some sheep across a field. It's not all that wild, really. Sometimes she's almost in focus.

Harry Brown (2009)

HARRY BROWN  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Daniel Barber

    Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, David Bradley,

    Liam Cunningham, Charlie Creed-Miles, Iain Glen

Michael Caine plays Harry Brown, a pensioner living alone in a rundown housing project that's not the kind of place you'd want to call home if you were hoping to avoid being mugged. Harry moves slowly now and he's wheezing from emphysema, but he spent some time as a marine in Northern Ireland when he was a lot younger, and when his best friend gets beaten to death by a gang of thugs, he starts to put some of his old military skills back into practice. A lot of critics have compared this (unfavorably) to Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino", which isn't quite fair to "Harry Brown". This one's a straight-up, no-frills, down-and-dirty vigilante flick in the tradition of "Death Wish" or "The Brave One". The set-up is cut-and-dried, with the population divided into two polarized segments: the decent silent majority, who had better learn how to fight back and defend themselves, and the violent, smack-shooting, lowlife scum who deserve only to be exterminated. As pure, primitive exploitation, it gets the job done, and Caine is brilliant, as usual. Emily Mortimer's in it, too. That's another good thing.

The Fighting Kentuckian (1949)

THE FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Waggner

    John Wayne, Vera Ralston, Philip Dorn,

    Oliver Hardy, Marie Windsor

Marching back to Kentucky after the War of 1812, the Duke stops in Alabama, where some French settlers loyal to Napoleon are trying to make a go of it, and some greedy land-grabbers are trying to rip them off. A lively western (though it all takes place east of the Mississippi) with cavalry battles, fistfights, chases on horseback, broad comic relief, coonskin caps and a dash or two of John Wayne's trademark frontier populism. One of only three features Oliver Hardy appeared in without Stan Laurel after the two teamed up.