Radio Days (1987)

RADIO DAYS  (1987)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Mia Farrow, Seth Green, Julie Kavner,
    Dianne Wiest, Michael Tucker, Josh Mostel,
    Wallace Shawn, Danny Aiello, Jeff Daniels,
    Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton, Kitty Carlisle Hart
Woody Allen's loving, episodic memoir about his time growing up in Brooklyn before and during World War Two, when nobody had much money and the radio was everybody's window on the world. This ends up being a lot less about Woody Allen and a lot more about an era that's fading away, along with those who remember it. A beautifully reconstructed time capsule, and one of Woody's best movies. 

Hurt (2003)

HURT  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mark Romanek
In what was probably one of the last things he did, a visibly frail Johnny Cash sings Trent Reznor's "Hurt", while sifting through the memories and souvenirs in a personal roadside museum. They say that when you're dying, your life passes before your eyes, and that's exactly what seems to be going on here. In the film's eeriest image, wife June Carter, who died before Cash did, stands at his shoulder like a guardian angel, waiting to take the old man home. He looks like he's ready to go. 

Walk the Line (2005)

WALK THE LINE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Mangold
    Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Shelby Lynne,
    Robert Patrick, Ginnifer Goodwin, Tyler Hamilton
Johnny Cash gets the Hollywood biopic treatment in a movie that follows the Man in Black from the cotton fields of Arkansas (and a horrifying sawmill accident that killed his older brother) through a hitch in the Air Force, his early days with Sun Records, marriage, kids, addiction, jail, music and the road, and most significantly, his ongoing romantic pursuit of muse, collaborator and eventual life partner June Carter. It's a well-intended misfire that covers most of the bases without ever capturing the essence of Johnny Cash. Phoenix plays Cash as a sullen, self-pitying jerk (which he no doubt sometimes was), but mostly misses his dark, playful wit. In the movie, Cash seems to suffer for his sins while he's still committing them, and while transgression and atonement were a big part of his mystique, Cash understood the flip side, too: that sinning was fun, or folks wouldn't keep on doing it. He might've come at you like the wounded voice of God, but you could tell he'd danced with the devil a few times, too, and his songs let you know he'd had a good time, to boot. Give Phoenix credit for taking the risk and doing his own singing, but watching the movie is like going to a bar to check out a decent cover band. It gets the look right sometimes, and sometimes comes close to the sound, but it's not the real thing.

How To Murder Your Wife (1965)

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Quine

    Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas,

    Claire Trevor, Eddie Mayehoff, Jack Albertson

A happily single comic-strip artist gets drunk at a friend's bachelor party and wakes up the next day married to the girl who jumped out of the cake. Before you can say, "What's the problem when the girl looks like Virna Lisi?", the guy's moping around grumping about how miserable he is, and hatching an elaborate plot to do her in. You can sense the potential for black comedy in this - imagine Jack Lemmon as Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" - but what you get is a mean and mostly unfunny sex farce in which all the wives are manipulative bitches and all the husbands are henpecked fools. All sarcasm. No wit.

Plagues and Pleasures On the Salton Sea (2004)

PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA 

    D: Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer               (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

A funny but horrifying postcard documentary, narrated by John Waters, about an evolving ecological train wreck: the perfect storm of ignorance, greed, bad planning, bad luck and the indifferent, unyielding power of nature converging around California's biggest inland body of water, the Salton Sea. Situated below sea level, just upwind from Palm Springs (bad news for Palm Springs), the sea was created by flooding from the Colorado River and polluted by runoff from nearby farms. Once thriving, promoted as California's Riviera, its main features today are the hulks of old boats and old businesses, 120-degree heat, water with a salt content higher than the ocean's, welfare recipients, crusty eccentrics, decay and dead fish. And with the salinity of the water increasing year by year, it's only going to get worse. Congressman Sonny Bono tried to do something about it, but then he ran into a tree. Sonny used to be the mayor of Palm Springs, too, of course. Maybe he knew which way the wind was blowing.

Number 17 (1932)

NUMBER 17  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alfred Hitchcock

    Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, John Stuart,

    Barry Jones, Anne Casson, Donald Calthrop

Early Hitchcock, part suspense comedy and part knockabout farce, about some shady characters who come together in an empty house on a dark and windy night. Roles and identities keep changing right up to the end, and the extended action set piece that wraps things up is a high-speed chase involving a hijacked bus and a runaway train. At 63 minutes, the movie moves right along, too.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE  (2010)  
    D: Jalmari Helander                                     ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Onni Tommila, Tommi Korpela,

    Rauno Juvonen, Ilmari Järvenpää

There's the frozen north and there's the frozen north, and then there's Lapland in the north of Finland, which is about as north and as frozen as you'd ever want to get. That's where this strange story takes place. It starts out with some sort of research excavation into a desolate, snow-covered mountain, which leads to the discovery of the world's most imposing grave, the final resting place of Santa Claus. Apparently, this Claus wasn't the jolly old elf you know from Clement Moore, but a storybook demon, and while you never get a clear look at Santa himself, you do get a couple hundred old elves running around, and they're scary enough, stealing the local children and making a real mess of the local reindeer herd. It's the strangest, darkest, least cute-and-cozy Santa Claus movie ever, and if you're in the mood for it, one of the funniest. Another odd thing: There are no female characters at all. Not one. It's like this twisted, frozen universe where all you've got are men and boys and ice and snow and elves and reindeer and the cold mountain grave of Santa Claus. And gingerbread. Don't go into this movie without some gingerbread.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: William A. Wellman

    Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews,

    Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Darwell.

A couple of cowpokes reluctantly join a posse riding out after some rustlers, only to end up on the short end of the argument when the posse turns into a lynch mob. William Wellman's spare, gripping indictment of mob justice, a classic western based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. There's a lot of Tom Joad in Fonda's incorruptible cowboy, and a lot of Henry Fonda in both of them. Harry Morgan, then in his 20s, plays Fonda's sidekick, the best movie role of his career.

Harry Morgan

(1915-2011)

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Andrew Adamson

    Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley,

    Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy,

    Jim Broadbent, Kiran Shah, James Cosmo

The Disney version of the much-loved C.S. Lewis tale about four kids who find the doorway to an ice-bound fantasyland in a wardrobe full of old fur coats. This hasn't got the obsessive craftsmanship Peter Jackson brought to the "Lord of the Rings" movies, but on the level of a children's story it hooks you just the way the book did, and Tilda Swinton as the coldly psychotic White Witch rates a spot next to Margaret Hamilton in the Wicked Witch Hall of Fame. The Christian symbolism can be heavy-handed (it goes with the territory), but it's worth noting that in the final confrontation with the White Witch, the Christ figure, Aslan, doesn't turn the other cheek. He rips her face off.

Naked Edge / Take 2

Dennis Hopper and Amy Irving

    in "Carried Away"

Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil

    in "Walkabout"

Keith Carradine and Valentina Vargas

    in "Street of No Return"

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe

    in "Antichrist"

Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello

    in "A History of Violence"

Marina Hands and Jean Louis Coullo'ch

    in "Lady Chatterley"

David Wenham and Susie Porter

    in "Better Than Sex"

Helen Mirren and Alan Howard

    in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"

Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox

    in "Intimacy"

Veronica Cartwright and Stephen Davies

    in "Inserts"

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ken Russell

    Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg,

    Sammi Davis, Peter Capaldi, Stratford Johns

The old dark cave where evil lurks . . . the wicked priestess preparing the ritual sacrifice to honor the undead . . . the innocent maiden, stripped to her underwear, writhing at the end of a rope . . . and waiting in the pit below, the legendary monster, the White Worm . . . A lurid, tongue-in-cheek horror show, based on Bram Stoker's last novel and catered by Ken Russell, who never did anything, except to excess. Donohoe bares more than her fangs as the sleek, serpentine vampire.

Ken Russell

(1927-2011)

The Statement (2003)

THE STATEMENT  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Norman Jewison

    Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam,

    Noam Jenkins, Charlotte Rampling, Matt Craven,

    Alan Bates, John Neville, Ciaran Hinds,

    David De Keyser, Frank Finlay, Edward Petherbridge

Michael Caine plays an old Frenchman on the run from his past and the evil shit he did as a collaborator during World War Two. Tilda Swinton plays the investigating judge who's determined to track him down, if a heart attack or some hired assassin doesn't kill him first. What makes this interesting, beyond the cat-and-mouse game, is that while the characters are French, the actors playing them are British. That won't please hard-core Francophiles, or fans of suspended disbelief, but it's a fine cast, and the locations, all over France, make a real nice backdrop for the chase.

John Neville

(1925-2011)

David and Bathsheba (1951)

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA  (1951)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Henry King

    Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Raymond Massey,

    Kieron Moore, James Robertson Justice, Jayne Meadows

A former shepherd, now the king of Israel, fiddles around with the wife of an army commander and learns what a harsh, unforgiving bastard that Old Testament God can be. A slow, stately biblical romance from the time before CinemaScope, which didn't stop the marketing department at 20th Century Fox from calling it "A Goliath of a Motion Picture!" Slog your way through it if you want to, or to save time, just read the Second Book of Samuel.

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

LINDA LINDA LINDA  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nobuhiro Yamashita

    Doona Bae, Yu Kashii,

    Aki Maeda, Shiori Sekine

A captivating little sleeper from Japan, about an all-girl high-school rock-&-roll band looking for a new lead vocalist and finding her in a Korean exchange student who's not exactly fluent in Japanese. A movie that, without seeming to do anything special, or even much of anything at all, totally gets what it's like to be a teenager. Winning performances by all four bandmates, and if you're not humming the title tune by the time it's over, you're either deaf or dead.

Age of Consent (1969)

AGE OF CONSENT  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Michael Powell

    James Mason, Helen Mirren, Jack MacGowran,

    Neva Carr-Glyn, Michael Boddy, Frank Thring

Powell and Mason teamed up to produce this idyll, set on an island off the Great Barrier Reef, and starring Mason as a painter happily on leave from the city and a young, naked Helen Mirren as the local girl who becomes his model and muse. Whether the scenery on view is Dame Helen or Dunk Island, it sure is nice to look at. Mirren's first movie, and Powell's last.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog introduces you to the world's oldest discovered art - cave paintings found in France in the 1990s, dating back some 30,000 years. The paintings are so accomplished, and so well-preserved, you wonder how they could possibly be authentic. With their realistic shadings and sense of proportion, and the contours of the cave walls providing an extra dimension and sometimes even the illusion of movement, they don't seem primitive at all. Herzog, viewing them with a filmmaker's eye and shooting them with a 3-D camera, even suggests that one eight-legged beast could be an example of "proto-cinema." The movie leaves you with a sense of amazement and a lot of unanswered questions. Like, how did the artists who painted the lions and leopards and rhinos and mammoths get close enough, while the animals were presumably still breathing, to get the look just right? The miracle's not just that the paintings survived into the current millennium. It's that the Stone-Age Gauguins and Picassos who created them survived their own research.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

THE JAZZ SINGER  (1927)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alan Crosland

    Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland,

    Eugenie Besserer, William Demarest, Roscoe Karns

Though he appeared in other pictures over the years, Al Jolson made a singular mark on movies with just one film - this one. He plays a cantor's son torn between his inflexible father's demand that he sing in the synagogue and his own unquenchable passion for jazz. (To what extent Jolson's music could be considered jazz is a matter for musicologists.) It's an odd thing to watch, shifting between silent melodrama and primitive sound, showcasing Jolson's arm-waving exuberance, and closing with the star singing "Mammy" in blackface. But it marks the pivotal moment in the transition from silents to sound, and its impact was immediate and irreversible. Within two or three years, every studio in Hollywood had converted to sound, and movies would never be the same.

The Illusionist (2010)

THE ILLUSIONIST  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Sylvain Chomet

A French animated feature based on an unfilmed screenplay by Jacques Tati, about an aging music hall magician who ends up in Scotland, where there's barely enough work to get by on, let alone provide for the servant girl who's moved into his life. True to Tati, it's done in pantomime, with music and sound effects and a few incidental words in a variety of languages. It's whimsical in a way only animated movies (0r Jacques Tati movies) can be, but it's not your typical cartoon for children. Its themes are more in line with real life. Sometimes, matter-of-factly, bad things happen, and a happy ending is not guaranteed. It's funny and it looks great and it's emotionally honest and it captures a time in the late 1950s, when the music halls were closing, television and rock & roll were taking over, and the old clowns and ventriloquists and rabbit-in-the-hat magic acts were running out of time. Highlight: when the magician walks into a cinema where Tati's "Mon Oncle" is playing, comes face-to-face with his live-action doppelgänger, watches for a moment, and walks back outside.

Quicksand (1950)

QUICKSAND  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Irving Pichel

    Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre,

    Barbara Bates, Taylor Holmes, Minerva Urecal

Mickey Rooney plays a garage mechanic who borrows $20 from the till to finance a hot date. Nothing goes right from then on, not that you expect it to. This is film noir, after all. And there's a reason it's called "Quicksand".

V For Vendetta (2006)

V FOR VENDETTA  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James McTeigue

    Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea,

    John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Rupert Graves,

    Sinead Cusack, Tim Pigott-Smith, Eddie Marsan

Sympathy for the devil, or at least for the terrorist in the Guy Fawkes mask. A subversive, futuristic thriller set in a totalitarian society where an acquiescent population has traded freedom for the illusion of security, the government rules through secrecy and fear, and owning a copy of the Koran is punishable by death. Based on Alan Moore's graphic novel, it's a lot less concerned with blowing stuff up than with making you think. It blows stuff up, too, of course, at the beginning and the end, while daring to suggest that there might be more to terrorism than mindless evil, and that certain governments may, in fact, have it coming to them. Hugo Weaving plays V, the man behind the mask. Natalie Portman plays a television production assistant who becomes his protégée, protector, soulmate and confidante. Stephen Rea plays the police inspector who uncovers more than the government wants him to know as he tries to track V down. John Hurt, in a stark reversal from his role in "1984", plays Big Brother. The music threatens to overpower the dialogue at times, but the message comes through loud and clear. A great movie to keep on hand for those times when you feel like blowing up a building yourself. Watch for the references to "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Grapes of Wrath". Penny for the Guy?

Screen Test / Take 2

Match the following actors with their real names:

  1. Boris Karloff

  2. Kirk Douglas

  3. Peter Lorre

  4. Tony Curtis

  5. John Wayne

  6. Robert Taylor

  7. Cary Grant

  8. Michael Caine

  9. Roy Rogers

10. Ray Milland

a. Archibald Leach

b. Marion Morrison

c. Reginald Truscott-Jones

d. Maurice Mickelwhite

e. Issur Danielovitch

f. William Henry Pratt

g. Leonard Slye

h. Bernard Schwartz

i. Laszlo Löwenstein

j. Spangler Arlington Brugh

Answers:

1-f / 2-e / 3-i / 4-h / 5-b / 6-j / 7-a / 8-d / 9-g / 10-c

House On Haunted Hill (1958)

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL  (1958)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Castle

    Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Elisha Cook Jr.,

    Richard Long, Carolyn Craig, Alan Marshall

A mysterious millionaire invites five guests to spend the night in a haunted mansion, with the promise that whoever survives till morning will take home $10,000. So you get 75 minutes of creaking doors, guttering candles, thunder and lightning, loaded guns in miniature coffins, severed heads, blood dripping from the ceiling, an organ that plays itself, a vat of acid in the cellar, Elisha Cook Jr. acting fidgety, and Vincent Price. None of it's especially scary. William Castle was an inventive (and shameless) B-movie marketeer with a gift for turning schlock gimmicks into quick profits. "House On Haunted Hill" was his showcase for "Emergo", which involved a skeleton planted somewhere in the theater darting out toward the audience at a particular point in the film. Theaters sold tickets and popcorn. Moviegoers screamed and laughed. Castle collected his money. Everybody had a good time. And except for the rare midnight screening on Halloween, "Emergo" never showed up again.

Nowhere Boy (2009)

NOWHERE BOY  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sam Taylor-Wood

    Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff

The early days of John Lennon, as a bespectacled kid in late-'50s Liverpool, shuffling between his caring but straight-laced Aunt Mimi and his caring but unbalanced mother Julia. There's a school suspension relating to a pornographic magazine, and banjo lessons from his mum, and Aunt Mimi buys John his first guitar, and he forms a rock-&-roll band called the Quarrymen, and then Paul and George join the group, and the rest, of course, is history. There's some overdone melodrama here, not that John's life didn't have some of that, but mostly it's a sweetly evocative portrait of the artist as a Beatle-in-the-making. Aaron Johnson effectively captures Lennon in all his funny, arrogant, impish, prickly complexity, and Beatles fans will have a good time picking out incidental references to the songs he'd write later on. Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are annoyingly good as the two older women in Lennon's life.

Quintet (1979)

QUINTET  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Altman

    Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey,

    Vittorio Gassman, Nina Van Pallandt, Brigitte Fossey

Cryptic, ice-age sci-fi about a seal hunter (Paul Newman) who walks in out of a frozen wasteland to look for work in the city, because there are no more seals to hunt. In the city, icicles hang down everywhere. Packs of wild dogs feast on corpses left in the streets. Food and fuel are scarce. There is no work. Instead, everybody plays Quintet, a board game that both reflects and determines the fates of its players. It's hard to know what to make of this, but it's definitely not like anything else, terse and ghoulish, somber and playful, one of Altman's most mystifying visions, and probably the strangest thing Newman ever did. Filmed in the middle of a Canadian winter, in and around the crumbling remains of the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, it doesn't look like anything else, either.

Micmacs (2009)

MICMACS  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jean Pierre Jeunet

    Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, Julie Ferrier,

    André Dussolier, Yolande Moreau, Omar Sy,

    Marie-Julie Baup, Nicolas Marié, Michel Crèmandés

This movie opens with a soldier somewhere out in the desert, trying to defuse a land mine. The mine goes off and the soldier is killed. Flash ahead 20 years, and the soldier's son, now grown up and clerking in a Paris video store, gets shot in the head during a robbery. The clerk recovers, with a bullet still lodged in his skull, and joins small band of eccentrics living under a junk yard, where he hatches an elaborate plan to get back at the weapons manufacturers who made both the mine and the bullet. Which could be the setup for a shoot-'em-up action flick, but it's not. It's a comedy, like what you might get if Terry Gilliam made a Buster Keaton movie (or maybe the other way around), by the same guy who made "Amélie" and "Delicatessen". Like John Waters, Jeunet has a real affection for his misfit characters and a cinematic vision that's uniquely his own, and he sees to it that the merchants of death get what's coming to them in a way that's both funny and satisfying. Humanity triumphs, if only for a moment, and only on film. Justice is served.

Gold (1972)

GOLD  (1972)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Desloge, Bob Levis

    Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr,

    Sam Ridge, Orville Schell, Dorothy Schmidt

Hmmmm . . . okay . . . let's see . . . There's a gold rush. And a train. And a blonde in a tight white dress. And a corrupt politician. And a crooked cop. And a guy on crutches. And some people called the Mud People, rolling around naked in the mud. And a revolution. And none of it makes any sense, because everybody who worked on this (apparently) was higher than a kite. It's an hour and a half of narrative incoherence and improvised gibberish, next to unwatchable, except for the naked hippie chicks and some tunes by the MC5. Good luck getting through it all, if you're not high on something yourself. Filmed in 1968, but not released theatrically till years later. You can kind of see why.

A Single Man (2009)

A SINGLE MAN  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tom Ford

    Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult,

    Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena, Paulette Lamori

Colin Firth, looking strangely a lot like Nelson Rockefeller, plays George Falconer, a gay English professor coming apart in the wake of his longtime lover's unexpected death. The year is 1962 - the Cuban Missile Crisis is playing out in the background - and for men like George, being closeted isn't an option. It's a fact of life. Firth, who plays several key scenes in tight close-up, gives a wrenching performance, showing the anguish of a man trying desperately not to let his anguish show, and Ford's visual style has a nice way of showing the world from George's vantage point. When he's checking out a cute young guy, there's no doubt what he's looking at, because that's what you're looking at, too. The flashbacks tend to be in bright colors or black and white, with more muted tones for the later scenes. And the straight neighbors across the street are shot in gauzy slow motion, reinforcing the professor's sense of isolation. He's as closed off from their world as they are from his.

Hell and High Water (1954)

HELL AND HIGH WATER  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Richard Widmark, Bella Darvi, Victor Francen,

    Cameron Mitchell, Gene Evans, David Wayne

Two-fisted action with Widmark as a submarine captain on a mission to investigate some suspected nuclear activity in the Arctic. An exciting Cold War thriller from a time when the only good commie was a dead one and everybody knew it. Bella Darvi plays the only woman on board, a dishy scientist who appears to be fluent in all of the world's languages.

Four Lions (2010)

FOUR LIONS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Christopher Morris

    Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Riz Achmed,

    Adeel Akhtar, Preena Kalidas, Mohammad Aquil

A British black comedy about a small band of self-styled jihadis who decide to become suicide bombers. First they have to assemble the means to make the bombs (they need lots of bleach), and then there's the matter of deciding what, besides themselves, they want to blow up. (Possible targets include a pharmacy, the Internet, a mosque and the London Marathon.) So, okay, these aren't the brightest amateur terrorists on the block, a liability that's only slightly offset by the fact that they're completely delusional. You've got to admire a movie that would take on terrorism as a subject for comedy in the first place. But you've really got to admire one that would take a premise like this to its logical conclusion, which this film does. I saw it in a small theater with about ten other people, half of them watching in stony silence and the other half laughing hysterically. Me, I was one of the ones laughing. When a trainee in a terrorist camp in Pakistan tries to fire a rocket at an American drone and accidentally kills Osama Bin Laden instead, what's not funny about that?

Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938)

MR. MOTO'S GAMBLE  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Tinling

    Peter Lorre, Keye Luke, Lynn Bari,

    Maxie Rosenbloom, Ward Bond, Harold Huber,

    Douglas Fowley, Jayne Reagan, Lon Chaney Jr.

Peter Lorre was one of the screen's most distinctive character actors, a gnome-like figure who alternated between leads and supporting roles throughout his career. In the late 1930s, he got to play the impeccably smooth-mannered detective Mr. Moto, in a series of mysteries based on the novels of John P. Marquand. In this entry, Mr. Moto takes on the case of a boxer killed in the ring. It's a lively B-movie whodunit, and while Lorre was Hungarian and Marquand's sleuth is Japanese, you wouldn't want anybody else to play Mr. Moto. It started shooting as a Charlie Chan film, and went over to Mr. Moto when Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan, backed out. Which explains why Keye Luke, Charlie Chan's #1 son, shows up here, too, doing broad comic relief with ex-pug Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom.

Mad Cowgirl (2006)

MAD COWGIRL  (2006)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gregory Hatanaka

    Sarah Lassez, James Duval, Linton Semage,

    Walter Koenig, Devon Odessa, Vic Chao

Sarah Lassez, who looks enough like Julia Roberts to be her sister, plays a meat inspector named Therese, whose voracious appetite for the stuff she inspects could be leading to symptoms of mad cow disease. A chaotic social satire in multiple languages that gets by for an hour or so by taking random potshots at televangelists, Hong Kong action movies, self-serving political hacks (on C-Span, playing themselves) and, most damningly, the beef industry. (The odds that you'll want to go out for a steak after watching it are minimal.) Eventually, the lack of anything close to a coherent story takes its toll, and the movie concludes with a spoof of "Kill Bill" that might seem more inspired, or less redundant, if "Kill Bill" wasn't already a spoof of itself. To the extent that the film holds together at all, it's because of Lassez, who tears into her role the way Therese might tear into a prime fillet. No Julia Roberts movie ever left its heroine covered in this much blood.

Movie Star Moment: John Wayne

    I don't even remember what movie this was in. It was something I saw in an Army/Air Force theater around 1970 with my buddy Dave, a fellow airman and a big John Wayne fan. It's a real short scene, really just a shot, of John Wayne walking into a saloon. That's all. Just the Duke walking in through the swinging doors. The thing was, John Wayne had a way of walking that wasn't like anybody else. He had a barrel chest and no hips and a midsection that expanded some as he got older. And he had this distinct way of walking, where his arms would swing from side to side across his body as he moved. So when he walked into the saloon swinging his arms like that, Dave and I broke out laughing. Nobody else did. Except for the movie's soundtrack and the faint whir of the projector, you could've heard a pin drop. And then we remembered where we were: in an armed forces theater, with the Vietnam War going on a few thousand miles away, surrounded by people who probably didn't care much for these two low-ranking goofballs laughing at the Duke. We were both real quiet after that, and while I've pretty much forgotten the rest of the picture, I still remember that shot of John Wayne walking into the saloon. We weren't laughing at the Duke. We were laughing because it was perfect. It was pure John Wayne.

Rio Grande (1950)

RIO GRANDE  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Ford

    John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson,

    Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Claude Jarman Jr.,

    J. Carrol Naish, Chill Wills, Grant Withers

The final entry in John Ford's cavalry trilogy, with the Duke as an Army colonel fighting Indians along the Mexican border and haunted by a Civil War incident that cost him his family. The story ultimately has less to do with the Indian war than the conflict within Wayne's character. Like Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers", Kirby York is a man whose pathological sense of duty - in this case to the Army - is integral to his heroism, even as it cuts him off from those he most wants to protect. The resolution might be less unforgiving here, but the underlying elements are pure John Ford: the suggestion of something unfathomably dark in a movie that's almost meditative in its sentimentality.

Directed By John Ford (1971/2006)

DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD  (1971/2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Peter Bogdanovich

When he made the original version of this, Peter Bogdanovich managed to coax John Ford out to Monument Valley, got him to sit in front of a camera for a while, and asked him a bunch of questions about his long life as a director of Hollywood movies. Even more remarkably, Ford actually answered some of the questions. (A typical Ford response, when asked how he filmed a particular scene: "With a camera.") Bogdanovich also sat down with Henry Fonda, James Stewart and John Wayne to get their Ford stories, and hired Orson Welles to do the narration. That was in 1971. In 2006, Bogdanovich recut the picture, integrating new interview footage (Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Walter Hill) with what he'd done before. The result is one of the best movies ever made about the movies, and maybe the truest picture we'll ever get of the irascible, contradictory Ford. Ford's reputation for meanness is well documented, and just about everybody who worked for him became a target of his legendary cruelty sooner or later. At the same time, they all seem to be glad for the experience, and there's real insight in what they have to say. All of it's illuminated with film clips - lots of them - corresponding to whatever aspect of Ford's career is being discussed. The riverbank scene in "Two Rode Together" is a highlight, but the most revealing moment is a startlingly personal one captured by accident. It's a conversation between the dying Ford and Katharine Hepburn, recorded on an audio machine neither of them knew was running. "I love you," Ford says at one point. "It's mutual," Hepburn replies. Nothing fancy. No fuss. Straight to the point. A simple exchange between two old friends (and ex-lovers), one of them close to the end. Just the kind of thing you could put in a John Ford movie.

Chocolate (2008)

CHOCOLATE  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Prachya Pinkaew

    JeeJa Yanin, Pongpat Wachirabunjong,

    Hiroshi Abe, Taphon Phopwandee

This was made in Thailand and I watched it without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. The main character's a young deaf girl whose singular preoccupations are kick boxing and the Thai equivalent of M&Ms. By the time the movie's over, she's wiped the floor with about 300 guys, just like Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill", but without the bright yellow jumpsuit. The kid's good, and as long as she's beating the shit out of people, you really don't need the subtitles. The footage that plays with the end credits suggests that the first-aid unit got plenty of work during the shoot.

Too Late the Hero (1970)

TOO LATE THE HERO  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Aldrich

    Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Denholm Elliott,

    Ian Bannen, Percy Herbert, Harry Andrews,

    Ronald Fraser, Henry Fonda, Lance Percival

A reluctant American officer, assigned to a British combat unit in the New Hebrides, heads out into the jungle with a bunch of misfit commandos to take out a Japanese radio transmitter in advance of a planned U.S. attack. To some extent, this parallels "The Dirty Dozen" (another Aldrich movie), but the mood is more somber and there's a grim edge to the violence. Robertson's good as the cynical Yank, but it's Caine's insolent self-assurance as a Cockney medic that keeps you hooked. When Caine sticks a rifle in Ronald Fraser's face, and fixes him with those unblinking eyes, and tells him matter-of-factly that he'd just as soon shoot him as the Japanese, you believe it, and Fraser does, too. The attitudes reflect the time the movie was made more than the time it's about. The war might be World War Two, but the sensibility is unmistakably Vietnam.

Cliff Robertson

(1923-2011)

Goya's Ghosts (2007)

GOYA'S GHOSTS  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Milos Forman

    Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman,

    Randy Quaid, Michael Lonsdale, Blanca Portillo

It's clear from the opening frames of this that Milos Forman has spent a lot of time looking at the work of Francisco Goya. Enough to wonder what stories might be behind the artist's startling images. Enough to write a script and make a movie about them. Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya, working incessantly, turning out paintings, sketches and prints, and eluding the Inquisition at least partly because he's the official portrait painter to the Spanish king. Not so lucky is his model and muse (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who's arrested, imprisoned, tortured and forced to confess to an offense she knows nothing about. Also unlucky in the long run is her inquisitor (Javier Bardem), whose intelligence and ruthlessness can't save him from the shifting currents of history. It plays like one of those 19th-century novels where characters keep turning up and finding each other again and again over years and years, no matter the odds against them. Portman, who you'd think would've suffered enough in "V For Vendetta", emerges from 15 years of captivity in ruins, her beauty gone, her spirit, her mind and apparently her jaw shattered beyond repair. A ghost, for sure. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one, and its best moments are the ones that show Goya at work, scratching with charcoal or dabbing with paint, an eyewitness to a terrible time, who had the skill and the luck and the passion to record what he saw for the rest of us.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

SLEEPAWAY CAMP  (1983)  ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Hiltzik

    Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten,

    Mike Kellin, Desiree Gould

Gender-bent horror thriller about a serial killer terrorizing a summer camp. Slasher movie rule #18: If you're hanging out at a summer camp where your fellow campers and counselors keep getting bumped off in horrible ways, it's probably not a good idea to make fun of that weird, quiet girl who watched her dad and brother die in a grisly boating accident out on the lake eight years before. Something bad is bound to happen if you do.

Midnight In Paris (2011)

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Woody Allen

    Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams,

    Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen,

    Nina Ariadna, Léa Seydoux, Carla Bruni,

    Adrien Brody, Corey Stoll, Kathy Bates,

    Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Adrien de Van,

    Marcial Di Fonzo, Yves Heck, David Lowe

Woody Allen's valentine to Paris starts out with a series of idealized, picture-postcard shots of the city. The story has to do with an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) and his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) who have checked into the kind of luxury hotel the rest of us will never be able to afford, to spend a few days playing tourist, sometimes in the company of the fiancée's parents. Wilson loves the city and has a passion for its cultural past, specifically the 1920s. He'd like to stay and work on a novel. The others just want to do some shopping, see a few sights, and as quickly as possible get back to California. Then one night, Wilson's out walking the streets alone when, at the stroke of midnight, a vintage limo pulls up and a well-dressed gent offers him a lift. The next thing he knows, he's at a swank party with all authentic-looking '20s decor, and he could swear that's really Cole Porter playing the piano, and then Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald introduce themselves and offer to show him the town. He's still in Paris, but he's not in the 21st century anymore. For what it's worth (a lot, if you're a fan), this is Woody Allen's most purely enjoyable movie in years, in which he lovingly recreates an imagined "golden age," and then questions whether, given the chance, you'd actually want to go back and live there. All the key players from the Lost Generation turn up. Corey Stoll plays Hemingway, who can't speak except in sentences that sound like bad Hemingway. Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot come and go, and Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas and Josephine Baker make cameo appearances. The actor who appears to be having the most fun is Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, and there's an amusing bit where Wilson corners Luis Buñuel and pitches an idea for a film, which Buñuel finds incomprehensible, and which, of course, Buñuel will turn into an actual movie a few decades down the line. In contrast to the '20s scenes, the contemporary ones and the characters in them are so annoying, you can see why Wilson would want to escape to another time. (You'd like to escape from them yourself.) What you don't see is what Wilson and McAdams have in common as people that would make them want to hook up in the first place. It's not just a lack of chemistry. They don't seem connected at all. But that's a small complaint in a movie that suggests Allen might be moving on at last from his preoccupation with guilt and murder. To say it's a welcome return is to understate the obvious.

Quo Vadis (1951)

QUO VADIS  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mervyn LeRoy

    Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov,

    Leo Genn, Patricia Laffan, Finlay Currie

In the year 64, General Marcus Vicinius returns to a hero's welcome after the conquest of Britain, but finds that his adventures are just beginning when he falls head-over-heels for a devout Christian girl. Meanwhile, the cruel, petulant Emperor Nero is making his own plans to torch Rome and then rebuild it. So Rome burns. And there's a high-speed chariot race along the Appian Way, as Robert Taylor dashes back to the burning city to rescue Deborah Kerr. And a lot of sanitized carnage in the Colosseum, when the Christians are tossed to the lions. It's the old DeMille formula: a calculated measure of Sunday-school piety to counter (and justify) the violence, decadence, mammoth sets and proverbial cast of thousands. Peter Ustinov chews up the imperial palace as Nero, but it's Leo Genn as Petronius, Nero's cynical adviser and confidant, who gets most of the good lines.

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

THE KILLER INSIDE ME  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Michael Winterbottom

    Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba,

    Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Tom Bower,

    Simon Baker, Bill Pullman, Caitlin Turner

With his boyish look and high-pitched drawl, Casey Affleck would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the Movie Psycho Hall of Fame. And yet in "The Killer Inside Me", there he is, playing an outwardly personable small-town deputy named Lou Ford, just the kind of guy you'd trust to enforce the law and maybe even date your daughter, right up to the point where he starts beating up women and torturing drunks and shaking down witnesses and killing them. In fact, Lou's been committing atrocities, covering them up and framing others for his crimes since childhood, and he's always gotten away with it, till now. Jessica Alba plays a prostitute Lou hooks up with. Ned Beatty's a contractor with a hand in all the local corruption. Kate Hudson is Lou's girlfriend. Elias Koteas plays a union boss. In flashbacks, Caitlin Turner plays Lou's mother, and you really don't want to know what went on between Lou and his mother. Or maybe you do. If the key to Lou's present is his past, he didn't become this fucked-up overnight. It goes way back. The story comes from a book by Jim Thompson. The style is pure pulp fiction. The whole thing could make you feel like taking a bath. But what'll really creep you out, what could make you never trust a kid with a badge and a gun again, is this character Lou Ford. Played with calculating ease and cold, dead eyes by Casey Affleck.

A Trip To the Moon (1902)

A TRIP TO THE MOON  (1902)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    Georges Méliès

    Georges Méliès, Henri Delannoy, Bleuette Bernon

A turn-of-the-century fantasy about some scientists who build a rocket and blast off to the moon, where they're chased and captured by a tribe of disappearing imps. Méliès was a French magician and the first filmmaker to realize the medium's potential for pure illusion. His effects look primitive now, but at a time when viewers were still getting used to pictures that moved, they were revolutionary. The shot of the rocket hitting its target square in the eye is one of the most widely recognized images from the early days of film.

The Company Men (2010)

THE COMPANY MEN  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Wells

    Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones,

    Maria Bello, Kevin Costner, Rosemarie DeWitt

I always thought the George Clooney movie "Up In the Air" should've ended with Clooney's character being fired by Anna Kendrick, the young go-getter he'd trained. Something like that does happen in "The Company Men", with Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones playing executives at various levels on the corporate food chain, all let go in the name of efficiency, but in reality as part of a scheme to drive up the value of the company's stock. It's the Great Recession hitting home for the men with the six-figure incomes and lifestyles to match. There are no surprises in it at all, but Jones and Cooper effectively capture the anguish of men whose best working years have gone to a system that's throwing them away, and Kevin Costner does what amounts to a movie-star disappearing act with a supporting role as Affleck's crotchety, blue-collar brother-in-law. The most wrenching moments in "Up In the Air" weren't focused on Kendrick or Clooney, but on the point-blank testimony of real people who had lost their jobs. Getting downsized is grim at any income level, but somehow it's harder to sympathize with a guy in a tailored suit who's behind on his country club dues and facing the loss of his Porsche.

D.O.A. (1981)

D.O.A.  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Lech Kowalski

Neatly edited documentary about the English punk scene, revolving round the Sex Pistols' aborted 1978 U.S. tour. Kowalski does an especially good job of connecting the punks and their music with the era of working-class despair that produced them. For the morbidly curious, or the just plain morbid, there's some creepy footage of a heroin-glazed Sid Vicious nodding off during an interview, while horror-show girlfriend Nancy Spungeon tries to goad him into something resembling consciousness and prevent his frequently dropped cigarettes from setting the bed on fire. D.O.A., for sure.

Garage Days (2002)

GARAGE DAYS  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alex Proyas

    Kick Gurry, Pia Miranda, Brett Stiller,

    Chris Sandrinna, Russell Dykstra, Maya Stange

We've all known somebody, at some point, who had a rock-&-roll band. It's practically universal. Usually just a group of friends practicing in somebody's basement and trying to write a few original songs to go with some standard repertoire of covers. Sometimes they landed gig at a local club or bar, or opened for some better-known act. A few might've gone beyond that, but not many. This movie is about a group of bandmates kicking around Sydney, Australia, and trying to keep the dream alive, hoping for that one big break. You can tick off the essential plot points as they occur - the fights, the breakups, the shifting alliances, the romantic entanglements, the rivalries, the drugs taken and the lessons learned - but it's all handled with a refreshing lack of pretense, a loopy sense of humor and a genuine affection for its characters, two of whom share one of the great screen kisses of all time. The climactic big break doesn't come off the way you might expect, but it's perfect in the context of the film.

The Swimmer (1968)

THE SWIMMER  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Frank Perry

    Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Janet Landgard,

    Kim Hunter, Marge Champion, Bill Fiore

An unusual study in disintegration, starring Burt Lancaster as an affluent suburbanite who decides to swim home by cutting across all the swimming pools in the county. It's a story that demands understatement, which it doesn't get, either from Frank Perry's direction or Marvin Hamlisch's musical score. What it does get is a devastating performance by Lancaster in a role that's as physical as it is psychological. His wardrobe for the entire film is a pair of swimming trunks, and he's not even always wearing those. Lancaster was in his mid-50s then, but he was still an athlete, in amazing shape, and more than most other movie stars, he knew how to act with his body. He does that here. By the time he reaches the end of his epic swim, you realize that what you've been watching is really an internalized horror movie. Based on a story by John Cheever, who appears briefly in a party scene. The Michael Douglas thriller "Falling Down" is a partial remake of this.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul W.S. Anderson

    Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates,

    Shawn Roberts, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe

Alice against the zombies, round four. This installment of the action movie/video game franchise starts out in Tokyo, with multiple versions of Alice (Milla Jovovich) blasting their way through the security system of the evil Umbrella Corporation. Tokyo ends up in ashes, but Alice escapes, and after a stopover in Alaska, she flies down the coast to Los Angeles, where a handful of survivors are holed up in an abandoned prison, trying to escape about a million undead. Some of this looks so much like "The Matrix", you wonder why Keanu Reeves doesn't turn up in his shades and long black coat. Firepower: extensive. Icky special effects: yes. Nudity: none. Zombie count: impossible to determine. Odds of another sequel: 100%. By the way, if you're doing some long-term investing, it appears from the evidence presented here that two commodities guaranteed to survive the apocalypse are high-tech weaponry and cosmetics. Consult your financial adviser today.

Listomania / Take 2

Be glad you weren't the guy who had to fit these movie titles on a theater marquee:

"The Return of the Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe"

"Come Back To the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean"

"The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love"

"The Effect of Gamma Rays On Man-In-the-Moon 
  Marigolds"

"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and 
  Love the Bomb"

"Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You In the Closet and 
  I'm Feeling So Sad"

"Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But 
  Were Afraid To Ask)"

"The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and 
  Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?"

"Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and 
  Find True Happiness?"

"The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage To the 
  Waters of the Great Sea Serpent"

Carry On Behind (1975)

CARRY ON BEHIND  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Kenneth Williams, Elke Sommer, Kenneth Connor,

    Bernard Bresslaw, Jack Douglas, Joan Sims,

    Windsor Davies, Peter Butterworth, Liz Fraser

Archeologists uncover some Roman ruins buried beneath a caravan site, and who should be on holiday there but the "Carry On" gang. A late entry in the comedy series, a nonstop barrage of sexual gags and puns. Throw in Elke Sommer as an archeologist with a thick Russian accent, and the language really gets twisted. Cesspools play a key role in what passes for a plot. There are two of them. One is freshly dug. The other is filled to the top with the stuff cesspools are typically full of. Guess which one Kenneth Williams falls into. That's "Carry On".

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

    D: Daniel Alfredson                             (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,

    Annika Hallin, Mikael Spreitz, Jacob Ericksson

Part three of Lisbeth Salander's story starts out with Salander, broken and bloody, in an ambulance after being buried alive, shot three times and beaten to a pulp at the end of part two. And she's about to be charged with attempted murder, after trying and failing to kill her father. While she's recovering, investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist rallies the staff at Millennium magazine for an issue that will exonerate Salander and expose the creeps who have spent the last 15 years abusing her, trying to shut her up or do her in. It all gets pretty outlandish, a conspiracy involving a top-secret society of corrupt old men high up in the power structure of Sweden. (In these movies, men are not to be trusted, and men over 80 are not to be trusted at all.) What grounds it again are the performances. Nyqvist inhabits Blomkvist's bleary-eyed persona so completely, you can almost smell the coffee on his breath. As Salander, Noomi Rapace spends most of the movie confined to a courtroom, a jail cell, or a hospital bed, and for much of that time, she barely moves. Playing a character who's willed herself never to betray an emotion, she keeps you watching and wondering. The last encounter between the two is inconclusive. Or maybe not. He comes to the door of her apartment. They exchange a few words. Say they'll see each other around. But there's a real sense that their time together is over. More than the words, there's the way they look at each other. He's an open book. His face reveals everything. She's walled off, a cipher behind a dark-eyed mask. She's free, and she's a survivor, but she's been hurt too much for too long, and her wounds are too deep, for anybody or anything ever to repair the damage.