Crackers (1984)

CRACKERS  (1984)  ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Louis Malle

    Donald Sutherland, Jack Warden, Sean Penn,

    Wallace Shawn, Christine Baranski, Irwin Corey

Oddball caper about some would-be burglars trying to knock over a pawn-shop safe. The film's climactic heist is secondary to the interaction of its likeable, lowlife characters, an unlikely extended family with dreams of safecracking glory that can only go awry. The movie doesn't go anywhere particularly, but it has a good time not getting there.

The Young Victoria (2009)

THE YOUNG VICTORIA  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Jean-Marc Vallée

    Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany,

    Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, 

    Thomas Kretschmann, Jesper Christensen 

Unlike "Bright Star", 2009's other tall-hat romance, the love story in this movie has a happy ending, with Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, ruling England for more than 20 years as one of history's most famously devoted couples. Victoria lived and ruled a lot longer than that, but this is the story of her life as a young woman, a smart, severely protected teenaged princess in the process of becoming a queen. Like its heroine, the movie's surprisingly lively, and with an efficient script and a running time of 105 minutes, it's over before you're quite ready to let these lovers go. There's at least one distracting dolly shot and a few quick freeze frames that feel out of place in a movie set in the first half of the 19th century. But Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend are believably human as the royal couple, compelled by protocol and their unique circumstances to play their roles just so. Every once in a while, one of these romantic period pieces transcends its posh setting and high-end production values and gets the emotional stuff just right. That's what happens here.

Bright Star (2009)

BRIGHT STAR  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jane Campion

    Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider.

    Kerry Fox, Edie Martin, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

Love and John Keats. A good-looking period melodrama about the relationship between the great romantic poet and the love of his life, Fanny Brawne. The thing about falling in love with a poet, throughout history, is that poets seldom make any money, and that's a real problem for John and Fanny. No matter how much they adore each other, there's no getting around the fact that John's flat busted and always will be. So they do a lot of walking and talking and flirting and agonizing, but that's as far as it goes, because they're stuck. You'd think a movie with so much heartbreak and anguish going on would move you more, but there's something cold and distant about Campion's technique that prevents that. You watch John and Fanny's story play out without ever feeling involved in what happens to them. In a movie that's supposed to be all about emotion, that's a fatal flaw. Still, it does look real good, and all those pleats and ruffles and tall hats are a costume designer's dream. Paul Schneider has a showy good time as Keats' obnoxious patron and fellow poet, Brown, and Whishaw, who previously played the serial killer in "Perfume" and Rimbaud in "I'm Not There", looks right at home in the early 19th century.

A Gathering of Old Men (1987)

A GATHERING OF OLD MEN  (1987)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Volker Schlöndorff

    Louis Gossett Jr., Richard Widmark, Holly Hunter,

    Woody Strode, Julius Harris, Joe Seneca,

    Will Patton, Tiger Haynes, Papa John Creach

This plays like that scene in "Spartacus", where everybody stands up and claims to be Spartacus. It's a movie made for television, set in Louisiana, about a bunch of black farmers who band together when a redneck armed with a shotgun winds up dead in somebody's front yard. The storytelling's spare and powerful, and it's a great showcase for a cast of aging black actors who don't play their roles as much as they embody them. Widmark plays the white sheriff whose heavy-handed tactics run into a wall of dignified resistance. Papa John Creach contributed some of the music. Alternate title: "Murder On the Bayou".

The Cheerleader Massacre (2003)

THE CHEERLEADER MASSACRE (2003)  ¢ ¢ 

    D: Jim Wynorski

    Tamie Sheffield, Charity Rahner, Erin Byron,

    Leonard Johnson, Samantha Phillips, Brinke Stevens

A cheerleading squad. A house in the woods. A psycho on the loose. A formula slasher movie with a decent-looking cast and just enough R-rated T&A to keep you from hitting the stop button. Aging scream queen Brinke Stevens does a stone-faced cameo as a woman whose cheerleading career ended 30 years ago, at least. Filmed in "Hell-O-Vision" and "Howdyscope", whatever they are, but obviously shot on video. Most of the cheerleaders end up dead, of course. The DVD package includes a deleted scene featuring three women, a bathtub and three bottles of chocolate syrup. Consider the possibilities.

North Face (2008)

NORTH FACE  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: Philipp Stölzl

    Benno Fürmann, Florian Lukas, Johanna Wokalek

A gripping, bone-chilling adventure about the attempt in 1936 by two pairs of mountain climbers - two Germans and two Austrians - to scale the world's most notorious wall of rock: the North Face of the Eiger. The first team to the top gets an Olympic gold medal and the reflected glory the feat will bring to the Third Reich. For the Austrians, the political aspect is a motivating force. The Germans couldn't care less. Thrilling location work up on the mountain, and a charismatic performance by Benno Fürmann as the German team's more cautious member, who would still rather be scrambling up an Alp than cleaning latrines in Hitler's Mountain Division. Warning: If you watch this where it's air-conditioned, wear a coat. You can practically feel the ice crystals lashing your face and the mountain wind cutting through your clothes. 

The Truman Show (1998)

THE TRUMAN SHOW  (1998)  ¢ ¢ ¢   

    D: Peter Weir

    Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris,

    Natascha McElhone, Paul Giamatti

Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a 30-year-old man-child living in a pristine island community, an idealized, well-ordered vision of the American dream. He has a nice house, a beautiful wife, friendly neighbors and a job selling insurance at an office in town. What Truman doesn't know is that he's lived his entire life on camera, starting in infancy, as the star of a reality television show that runs 24/7. The streets, houses, water and sky are all part of a vast, enclosed set on which Truman's manufactured life plays out, while the people he comes in contact with, all of them, are actors improvising their performances around carefully allocated product placements and Truman. The movie spends some time wrestling with the moral implications of keeping an innocent like Truman in the dark about what's going on, especially as he begins to realize something's not right. But where it really hits home is in its depiction of the audience, who can't get enough of Truman's televised life story, till the moment it's over, and it's time to change the channel. There's an interesting side issue involving Laura Linney as the actress who plays Truman's wife. Presumably she and Truman have a sexual relationship - she keeps talking about wanting to have kids - but if she's really just an actress playing a part, how far is she expected to go in a case like this? You could argue that what she's doing amounts to prostitution, but that's an area the movie never approaches, and the question goes unresolved.

P2 (2007)

P2  (2007)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Franck Khalfoun

    Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley

A woman working overtime in a Park Avenue office building finds herself trapped in an underground parking garage on Christmas Eve, with only a vicious black dog and a homicidal maniac for company. A woman-in-peril exploitation thriller from a story by Alexandre Aja, who made the French slasher flick "High Tension". Intense and bloody, but ultimately kind of ridiculous, with Wes Bentley stealing a page from the Dennis Hopper book of demented bad behavior. There's virtually no nudity, but Rachel Nichols' cleavage gets plenty of close-up attention. (She spends most of the movie running around the garage in a chic, low-cut dress.) And the focus on the woman's victimization is a little disturbing. It's not hard to imagine one segment of the audience being repelled by it and another being turned on. Jodie Foster has gotten into these kinds of situations, too, the last few years, but Jodie's characters would never take this much shit, or wait as long to start getting even. Erica Bain would wipe the parking lot floor with this guy.

Tumbleweeds (1925)

TUMBLEWEEDS  (1925)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: King Baggot, William S. Hart 

    William S. Hart, Barbara Bedford, Lucien Littlefield

Classic western with William S. Hart as a straight-shootin' cowboy who meets a pretty girl and rides out to stake a claim in the Oklahoma Land Rush. The climactic stampede across the prairie is breathtaking: Hart, who was then about 60, did all his own riding, in what turned out to be his last movie. When the picture was reissued in 1939, Hart came back to introduce it with a soliloquy that's both maudlin and eerie: a silent screen star in his only sound film appearance, delivering what's essentially his epitaph.

Watchmen (2009)

WATCHMEN  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢    

    D: Zack Snyder

    Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley,

    Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matthew Goode

"Watchmen", written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, is considered by many to be the best graphic novel to date, and anybody who tried to turn it into a film was probably doomed to fail, at least in the eyes of the book's devoted readers. Radically reworking 20th-century history, it tells the story of some masked vigilantes, with names like Nite Owl, the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre, through a couple of generations, up to 1985, when Richard Nixon (still the president) is getting ready to launch the nukes in response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It's a big, wide-ranging story, one the book could barely contain, and one that demands to be expanded, not condensed, on the screen. A five-hour movie might accomplish that. At two-and-a-half hours, or even three, something gets lost. Characters are introduced and killed off before you know who they are. A significant subplot - a pirate story read from a newsstand comic book - gets dropped entirely. And whatever Silk Spectre was smoking in the book, she's not smoking it here. At the same time, the movie looks real good, especially the grimy cityscapes and the scenes on Mars. Moore's pessimistic view of human nature remains intact. And most of the leads - Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Carla Gugino as Silk Spectre, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl - are well-cast. Only Matthew Goode as the Aryan superman Veidt seems a little off. He doesn't look imposing enough to take on three superheroes at once, single-handed. And his megalomania would be more chilling if it was less overt. The most compelling character by far, in the book as well as the film, is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopath in a trench coat and fedora, who hates criminals even more than he hates pronouns, and whose terse, hard-boiled journal entries form the backbone of the plot. The others might take time out to consider whether the end justifies the means. Rorschach just starts breaking fingers. The Comedian would do that, too, but the Comedian's a sadist. Rorschach's just methodical. And ruthless. And remorseless. It's not the kind of role they typically give out awards for, but they should. Haley nails it.

All That Jazz (1979)

ALL THAT JAZZ  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bob Fosse

    Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking,

    Leland Palmer, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen,

    Erzsebet Foldi, Sandahl Bergman, John Lithgow

Ann Reinking's legs, Sandahl Bergman's tits and Bob Fosse's ego are all on display in this hyperkinetic musical in which a workaholic director/choreographer imagines his own death. It's a massively self-indulgent portrait of the artist as a driven, chain-smoking, womanizing louse, with Roy Scheider at his most seductively cynical playing the Fosse surrogate, Joe Gideon. Reinking plays herself, pretty much. Leland Palmer stands in for Gwen Verdon. Ben Vereen does a merciless send-up of Sammy Davis Jr. There are incidental references to "Lenny" and "Cabaret", and the song-and-dance work is unmistakably Fosse. You'll either like it or not, I guess, but one thing's for sure: It's not like any other musical or any other film. Look at it this way: How bad can death be, when the angel coming to get you looks like Jessica Lange? And what's not to like about Ann Reinking's legs?

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008)

HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Kevin Rafferty

Aging jocks recall an amazing Ivy League football game they played in 40 years ago. It was the last game of the season in 1968. Yale and Harvard were both undefeated, and Yale, ranked #16 in the country, was expected to win easily. For the game's first 59 minutes, it looked like that would happen, but the football gods had other ideas. Harvard lineman Tommy Lee Jones is one of the talking-head witnesses. Film footage and original play-by-play commentary reinforce (and sometimes contradict) what the players remember. It's a lot more exciting and entertaining than you might expect. Al Gore (Jones' Harvard roommate), George W. Bush (a Yale cheerleader), Garry Trudeau (who had just started to write "Doonesbury" at Yale), and even Meryl Streep (the invisibly quiet girlfriend of one of the players) all turn up in tangential anecdotes. How do you win a tie game? How do you lose one? Watch this movie and find out.

The 2009 Scobie Awards

Picture: "In the Loop"

Actress: Maria Heiskanen, "Everlasting Moments"

Actor: Bard Owe, "O'Horten"

            Nadim Sawalha, "Captain Abu Raed"

Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick, "Up In the Air"

Supporting Actor: Jackie Earle Haley, "Watchmen"

Ensemble: "In the Loop"

Cameo: Colleen DeLisle,

              "ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction"

Director: Veit Helmer, "Absurdistan"

Cinematography: Mischa Gavrjusjov and Jan Troell,

                               "Everlasting Moments"

Musical Score: John Erik Kaada, "O'Horten"

Foreign Language Film: "Rumba"

B Movie: "Zombieland"

Revival: "The Night of the Hunter"

Title Sequence: "Zombieland"

Trailer: "Sherlock Holmes"

Print Ad: "The Men Who Stare At Goats"

Career Achievement Award: Walter Hill