A Day's Pleasure (1919)

A DAY'S PLEASURE  (1919)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Charles Chaplin

    Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance,

    Henry Bergman, Jackie Coogan

Charlie Chaplin loads the family into the old jalopy, cranks up the engine and motors 0n down to the dock, where they board a pleasure boat for a day-long cruise on the water. Extended gags involve Charlie and several others getting seasick, and a kick-in-the-pants confrontation with a belligerent fellow passenger, who is (naturally) much bigger than Charlie. I watched this with Ms. Applebaum and her daughter Sonia, who was four at the time and thought it was quite amusing. Score one for Mr. Chaplin.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005)

LEONARD COHEN: I'M YOUR MAN  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Lian Lunson

A cursory look at the poet/songwriter's life and career, done with interview clips and concert footage. Cohen's an elusive subject, even when he's doing the talking, revealing what he wants to and deflecting the rest. In the musical segments, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainright, Kate and Anne McGarrigle and others take turns demonstrating how deceptively hard it is for somebody other than Leonard Cohen to get at the heart of a Leonard Cohen song. Beth Orton comes off the best, maybe because her unadorned vocal style on "Angel of Mercy" most closely approximates Cohen's own. It's not till the man himself steps behind the microphone, backed by U2, that a sense of what he's really about starts to emerge. You see it in the twinkling eyes and you hear it in the twisted lyrics and the soothing, doom-deep voice. If you're looking for a shot of hemlock to go with your gin and tonic, or a joke to get you by on your way to the apocalypse, he's your man.

National Velvet (1944)

NATIONAL VELVET  (1944)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Clarence Brown

    Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp,

    Anne Devere, Angela Lansbury, Reginald Owen

A girl wins a horse in a raffle and trains it to compete in the Grand National Steeplechase. An all-time family classic, in Technicolor from MGM. Taylor at 12 was already an eyeful. Those eyes.

Elizabeth Taylor

(1932-2011)

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE  (2009)

    D: Daniel Alfredson                                     ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,

    Peter Andersson, Michalis Koutsogiannakis

The second installment in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy peels back a couple more layers of Lisbeth Salander's backstory, and if you thought she had issues with men the first time around, it gets worse. The story picks up a year after "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" left off. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is back at Millennium magazine, which is about to blow the whistle on an international prostitution ring. Salander (Noomi Rapace) has slipped back into Sweden, more or less undercover, to take care of some unfinished business. There's a murder, a few of them, and Salander's the main suspect. This is a matter that needs to be investigated. Our detectives are on the case. What's different from the previous film is that this time Blomkvist and Salander are operating in separate spheres. Each is aware of the other's activities, mostly by computer, but they share almost no screen time and barely connect. And the focus shifts, from the two of them and their evolving relationship to Salander, and Rapace's charismatic performance in what's already an iconic role. Long before the bloody resolution, it's clear that this has become Lisbeth Salander's story. And Noomi Rapace's film.

The Cherry Orchard (1999)

THE CHERRY ORCHARD  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Cacoyannis

    Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, Katrin Cartlidge,

    Owen Teale, Andrew Howard, Melanie Lynskey,

    Gerald Butler, Ian McNeice, Michael Gough

Chekhov's 1904 drama about a family of Russian aristocrats rusting away on a crumbling estate, waiting (literally) for the ax to fall and resolutely doing nothing about it. There's some nice choreography in the way Cacoyannis moves the actors around, and the camera with them, but ultimately the movie can't help looking like what it is: a stately screen version of a century-old stage play. It's very well acted (of course), with an especially welcome turn by Michael Gough as the ancient butler, Feers, who not only accepts his state in life, he's devoted to it, and who's not quite as deaf or absent-minded as everybody thinks he is.

Michael Gough

(1917-2011)

Machete (2010)

MACHETE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Rodriguez, Ethan Maniquis

    Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba,

    Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin,

    Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal

In "Machete", character actor Danny Trejo gets what has to be the role of his career: an ex-cop-turned-day-laborer-turned-revolutionary-commando-turned-folk-hero, and an absolute fucking nightmare for all those patriots who believe the best way to protect our sacred border is with guns, plenty of ammo and a mile-high fence. Trejo's Machete doesn't talk much, and with an aura of invincibility and a face like a map of every bad road in Mexico, he doesn't have to. About all he has to do is stand there, the lethal, implacable eye in a storm of head-lopping, limb-severing, gut-spilling action-movie effects. Which is not to understate his skill as an actor. It's just that Trejo knows - and director Robert Rodriguez knows - that in this case, less is more. Much more. Robert De Niro camps it up as a redneck state senator, and Don Johnson plays a right-wing militia leader with jaunty malice, but the standout in the supporting cast is Michelle Rodriguez as a taco-truck vendor and rebel organizer code-named "She". When "She" shows up late in the film in form-fitting battle gear, with a patch over one eye and an automatic in each hand, the goon squad she's up against would do well to get out of her way.

The Mouse On the Moon (1963)

THE MOUSE ON THE MOON  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Lester

    Margaret Rutherford, Ron Moody, Bernard Cribbins,

    Terry-Thomas, Michael Crawford, June Ritchie

With $1 million in U.S. aid, a Soviet rocket, fuel made from local wine and stabilizers made from shower heads, the world's tiniest country, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, launches a manned flight to the moon. A daft English comedy, fast-paced and silly, a sequel to "The Mouse That Roared". Apparently there are people out there who believe that Neil Armstrong's moon walk in 1969 was a hoax. It wasn't, but here's the thing: Grand Fenwick got there first, and this movie proves it.

Quote File / Take 2

"Hey, whaddya say we go to the dump and shoot 
  some rats?"

  Sean Penn

  in "Sweet and Lowdown"

"Cats love cemeteries, don't they?"

  James Franciscus

  in "The Cat o' Nine Tails"

"I will not make love where dogs have peed."

  Helena Bonham Carter

  in "A Merry War"

"Badgers? Badgers? We don't need no stinking 
  badgers."

  Joey Medina

  in "Zombie Strippers"

"You wouldn't happen to have any animal crackers, 
  would you?"

  Mark Ruffalo

  in "Zodiac"

The Social Network (2010)

THE SOCIAL NETWORK  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Fincher

    Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer,

    Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Barry Livingston

This movie about Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard computer geek who created Facebook, starts out with Zuckerberg and his girlfriend drinking beer in an off-campus bar. They talk for a couple of minutes, and then she dumps him, not because he's a nerd, but because he's an asshole. You can see what she means. Zuckerberg might be a whiz at crafting computer code, but he has the psychological makeup of a 12-year-old. Zuckerberg leaves the bar and dashes home, where he gets drunk and exacts a little on-line revenge, which leads to an idea that will make him the world's youngest billionaire. Aaron Sorkin's script raises some interesting questions about intellectual property rights and the blinding speed at which cybertechnology evolves, but the main focus is on Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg as a baby-faced monster, a disturbingly amoral combination of intelligence, ego and spite. The movie ends with Zuckerberg on his laptop, logged on to Facebook, looking for a "friend," the question at that point being whether the guy who brought about the most pervasive social network ever has a single real friend in the world. The answer appears to be no.

War of the Colossal Beast (1958)

WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST  (1958)  ¢ ¢

    D: Bert I. Gordon

    Sally Fraser, Roger Pace,

    Dean Parkin, Russ Bender

The Amazing Colossal Man, the mutant survivor of a nuclear blast and apparent death in a film released the previous year, turns up in Mexico, and he's hungry. A sequel that answers at least one question - What does a 60-foot giant eat? (Truckloads of food) - while sensibly leaving untouched a related question - Where does a 60-foot giant go to the bathroom? It's probably just a matter of time before some movie tackles that question, too.

Black Swan (2010)

BLACK SWAN  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Darren Aronofsky

    Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey,

    Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, Benjamin Millepied

Darren Aronofsky's portrait of a dancer cracking up begins with a dream in which Natalie Portman as ballerina Nina Sayers imagines herself in a strange version of "Swan Lake". She wakes up (or does she?), catches the train to the studio, and after a series of misdirections and red herrings, finds she's landed the lead in "Swan Lake". Obsessed with perfection, goaded by a domineering choreographer and fawned over by her suffocating mother, she's pushed to the edge of madness, and over it. She has nowhere else to go. This is like a horror movie and a backstage melodrama, "Showgirls" and "The Red Shoes", a hallucination and a reflection on what defines an artist, all rolled into one. Which makes for kind of a crazy movie, but maybe not that far off from the way somebody as compulsively driven and emotionally fragile as Nina might view the punishing, hypercompetitive world of professional ballet. If nothing else, Portman and Aronofsky both take enormous risks, especially with the physical metamorphoses Nina undergoes as the dark side of her role takes over. Winona Ryder, the actress Portman more or less replaced as Hollywood's favorite dark-eyed ingenue, plays the dancer Portman's character replaces at the ballet, a twisted example of art imitating life, and a morbidly fascinating exercise in cinematic masochism.