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.