The King's Speech (2010)

THE KING'S SPEECH  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tom Hooper
    Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter,
    Guy Pearce, Derek Jacobi, Jennifer Ehle,
    Michael Gambon, Claire Bloom, Timothy Spall
The story of an unlikely friendship, between England's King George VI (Colin Firth) and Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist who helped the king deal with a debilitating stammer. It's 1936, and George (or "Bertie") has no desire to be king. But when his playboy brother abdicates, with war on the horizon, he gets the job. Which means he has to go on the radio. And speak. And that's where Lionel comes in. This is an actor's showcase more than anything. The Windsors have never been a real dynamic lot, distinguished mainly by their ordinariness and the fact that they happen to be royals. The movie turns on a series of witty exchanges between the relaxed but respectful commoner and the stodgy, uptight king. Thanks to Rush and Firth, you end up liking them both, and Helena Bonham Carter does a very nice bit as Bertie's wife, the queen and future queen mother, who unmistakably has both a royal sense of decorum and a common touch.

The Bunker (1981)

THE BUNKER  (1981)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: George Schaeffer
    Anthony Hopkins, Richard Jordan, Cliff Gorman,
    Michael Lonsdale, Piper Laurie, Susan Blakely
Anthony Hopkins takes a turn at the Führer, trembling, raging and losing his marbles (not to mention the war) in a bunker somewhere below the sewers of Berlin. Nobody would mistake this for the real thing, but Sir Anthony does bear a striking resemblance to Hitler.

District 9 (2009)

DISTRICT 9  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neill Blomkamp
    Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood,
    Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt
When an alien space station stalls out over Johannesburg, its crew and passengers are captured and transported to the surface, where they're confined in a squalid detention camp called District 9. Twenty years later, the aliens - called "prawns," because of the way they look - are about to be relocated to another camp, and that's where the story kicks in. In a movie coming from South Africa, the metaphor is obvious. The movie itself is like "Close Encounters" or "E.T." combined with a shoot-'em-up, blow-'em-apart action fest. It works surprisingly well, for all the gratuitous carnage involved. Just don't be surprised if you feel more sympathy for its alien characters than its human ones. 

The Laughing Policeman (1974)

THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stuart Rosenberg

    Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, Lou Gossett,

    Anthony Zerbe, Cathy Lee Crosby, Jonna Cassidy,

    Matt Clark, Warren Finnerty, Leigh French

A gunman with an automatic weapon shoots up a city bus, killing half a dozen people, including the partner of a gum-chewing police detective played by Walter Matthau. Reluctantly teamed with a new partner (Bruce Dern), Matthau starts to suspect that the killings could be tied to a homicide case he failed to solve two years before. Together with "Bullitt" and "Dirty Harry", this fits nicely in the subgenre of well-crafted San Francisco cop thrillers from the '60s and '70s. The location work is excellent - the city's Greyhound terminal in its entire history has never looked this clean - and some natural-sounding, overlapping dialogue helps move the story along. What's fun is the odd-couple casting of Dern and Matthau as two guys who, if they weren't stuck working together, would have nothing to do with each other, not out of antagonism as much as indifference. It's an anti-buddy movie, and these guys know exactly how to make that work.

Carancho (2010)

CARANCHO  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Pablo Trapero

    Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusman, Carlos Weber

Noir from Argentina about a disbarred lawyer, literally an ambulance chaser, who preys on the victims of car wrecks. When he gets involved with an emergency-room doctor who's self-medicating with the stuff she's supposed to be giving her patients, it's a connection of two doomed souls and a ticket to hell for both of them. Not that their lives aren't hellish enough to begin with. The corruption that runs the world they do their jobs in is pervasive and inescapable. Even the hospital looks squalid and gloomy, the last place on earth you'd want to end up if you needed medical care. The movie runs out of surprises eventually and goes on a little too long, but Darín and Gusman are both very good, and Trapero shoots a lot of it on the fly, as if a bunch of stuff was going on and he just happened to be there to catch it with a camera. I sure hope life everywhere in Argentina isn't like this.

Timerider (1983)

TIMERIDER  (1983)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Dear

    Fred Ward, Belinda Bauer, Peter Coyote,

    Ed Lauter, Tracey Walter, Richard Masur,

    L.Q. Jones, Chris Mulkey, Bruce Gordon

Fred Ward plays the title role, a motorcycle racer named Lyle Swann, who gets zapped back in time to the Wild West, where he doesn't exactly blend in. In fact, to the well-armed inhabitants of the 19th-century frontier, he looks like a man from Mars. Good thing for him they're such lousy shots. Nothing that happens in this makes much sense. It just kind of goes its own way, blurring any imagined distinction between weird and ridiculous, with a cast that may or may not be winging it while flashing a lot of primitive dental work. Watching it while under the influence of something might not help, but it couldn't possibly hurt.

Flashback: Spoilers

Warning: The following article is about spoilers. 
It contains some.

    When I was a kid going to movies back in the late Pleistocene, nobody knew what a spoiler was. In our neighborhood, I don't think the word even existed then as a way to describe the practice of revealing too much about a movie and spoiling it for somebody else. Most of the films my friends and I were watching - monster movies, swashbucklers, westerns and comedies - followed fairly predictable formulas, anyway. If you went to see something like "North To Alaska", or "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules", or "Horror of Dracula", you had a pretty good idea going in what you were going to get. Spoilers would've been redundant.

    Today it seems like spoiler alerts are everywhere. At the same time, we're being bombarded with more information about movies than ever before, often before the films are released, and sometimes from the same sources that are warning us against spoilers. New York Times critic A.O. Scott might've performed a valuable public service early last year, when he rattled off (in print) the climactic and supposedly top-secret plot points of "Citizen Kane", the "Star Wars" saga, "The Crying Game" and "Soylent Green", potentially spoiling those films for an untold number of readers. But how much to reveal about a movie when you're reviewing it is kind of an open question. The lines aren't carved in stone.

    For example:

    Sidney Lumet's 1974 mystery "Murder On the Orient Express" starts out with a dozen characters, all played by famous movie stars, getting on a train. One of them is going to be killed by the end of the first reel. The others are going to be suspects. Most reviews won't tell you who plays the murder victim. Why not? It's not like the character's identity stays secret very long. And the rest of the movie isn't really about who got killed, but who did the killing. And then there's the end, where each actor gets to take a final bow, a kind of on-screen curtain call, except the one who played the murder victim, because he can't, because his character's been bumped off. Which doesn't seem fair somehow. Spoiler Alert: The dead guy is Richard Widmark.

    Or take the 2010 Mel Gibson thriller "Edge of Darkness". To begin with, there's a significant plot thread running through this film that's exactly like what's going on in "The Lovely Bones". So if you say that to somebody who's seen "The Lovely Bones", do you spoil "Edge of Darkness"? And there's the way the movie ends, which you could compare to the end of "Hamlet", where pretty much everybody in the story dies. Is it okay to say that? I mean, Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" more than 400 years ago, so presumably the cat's out of the bag on that one. But if you tie it to a relatively new movie, are you letting the cat out of the bag all over again, or just beating the cat with a stick? I don't know. And Mel Gibson did a version of "Hamlet" once, too.

    My approach to spoilers is a lot like my approach to writing generally. I fly by the seat of my pants. I want to be fair, both to the movie I'm writing about, and to the reader who might not have seen it yet. I know there are times when I probably give too much away, and other times when I probably don't say enough. It's not an exact science, and there are spoilers in every review. But if you want to know what Chazz Palminteri figures out at the end of "The Usual Suspects", or the terrible secret Faye Dunaway carries around with her through most of "Chinatown", forget it. See the movie. Or go ask A.O. Scott.

The Artist (2011)

THE ARTIST  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: Michel Hazanavicius

    Jean Dejardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman,

    James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, 
    Malcolm McDowell, Ed Lauter, Missi Pyle

Here's something you wouldn't expect to find coming out in cinemas in 2011: a silent movie, done in the style of a silent movie, about Hollywood's transition from silents to sound. The main players are George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a swashbuckling action star modeled on Douglas Fairbanks, and a saucy young flapper named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose career takes off with talkies, just as Valentin fades away. It's hard to imagine now what a cataclysmic event the coming of sound was for some of the movie industry's biggest stars. The technology changed almost overnight, and performers who couldn't make the transition either saw their careers tail off, or were quickly gone. "The Artist" captures some of that as it traces Valentin's personal and professional decline, and Hazanavicius does a nice job of affecting the look and manner of a late-'20s silent film. At the same time, the emotional stakes stay relatively low. When Valentin sets fire to a stash of his old films late in the picture, you're more concerned with the strips of cinema that are being lost than the chance that this washed-up actor could die in the blaze. Another thing that's missing, that silent movies couldn't do without, is star power. Watch Douglas Fairbanks in anything, even now, and you know he had something that clicked on the screen. The guy was unmistakably a movie star. Dujardin, as good as he is and as hard as he tries, can only come off as an actor playing a movie star. It's an artful approximation, but the effect is not the same.

Post Script: I've watched a few more silent movies since I first saw "The Artist", and it's occurred to me that the model for Jean Dujardin's character might not be Douglas Fairbanks but John Gilbert. Both were action stars who saw their careers tail off with the coming of sound, but Gilbert's life and career were more dramatically ruined by it. George Valentin could be either of them. Or neither. Or both. 

N.H.
9/12/2016

Before I Hang (1940)

BEFORE I HANG  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Nick Grinde

    Boris Karloff, Evelyn Keyes,

    Bruce Bennettt, Edward Van Sloan

Karloff plays a doctor who's convicted of murder in a mercy killing just as he's about to perfect a serum that can reverse the aging process. Then, just minutes before he's scheduled to hang, he injects himself with the serum, only he uses a real murderer's blood. Then his sentence is commuted at the last minute and he's paroled and set free. Then the murderer in him really takes over and he starts to go around killing people. It sounds far-fetched and it is, but get past the suspension-of-disbelief part and it's actually a pretty good horror thriller. Just watch out any time Boris starts wringing his hands, or feeling the back of his neck.

Bill Cunningham New York (2010)

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Richard Press

If you've ever looked at the Sunday New York Times, you've probably looked at Bill Cunningham's photographs. He's the guy in the Styles section who shoots all those society events and documents what people are wearing on the sidewalks and streets of the city. The first time you see him in this documentary, he's pulling his bicycle out of a closet and heading out to take pictures. He weaves his way through Manhattan traffic as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He's thin and his hair is white. He's wearing a blue coat. He's not wearing a helmet. He's 81 years old. This is a guy who loves what he does, to the point where he seems to do nothing else. His studio apartment is crammed wall-to-wall with file cabinets full of negatives. (He's still shooting film.) His eye is for fashion. He shoots real fast and he shoots just about everything. He eats on the fly and apparently works every day. His spirit is infectious. It's unlikely any of us will ever take pictures for the New York Times. But it's hard to watch Cunningham go about his creative routine, and talk about it, without being inspired. Bill Cunningham. That's what I want to be like when I'm 81.