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)