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)