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.