The Hunted (1948)

THE HUNTED  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jack Bernhard
    Preston Foster, Belita, Pierre Watkin,
    Russell Hicks, Frank Ferguson, Edna Holland,
    Charles McGraw, Cathy Carter, George Chandler
A film noir in which everything doubles back on itself, about a police detective who starts to fall for the girl he sent up on a diamond-heist rap four years before. Now she's out on parole and tells him she's going straight and he wants to believe her, but he's not sure he can trust her, and she does act mighty suspicious for somebody who insists she was innocent all along. She's also threatened to kill him, and this is film noir, so where do you go from there? There are some impressively long takes in this, and George Chandler, who played W.C. Fields' errant son in "The Fatal Glass of Beer", steals a scene or two as a bartender who bends the detective's ear with a lot of unwanted advice. 

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

BUBBA HO-TEP  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Don Coscarelli
    Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce,
    Heidi Marnhout, Bob Ivy, Larry Pennell
What if Elvis and JFK didn't die, but ended up as old men shuffling around the same rundown Texas nursing home? And JFK is black, and Elvis has traded identities with an Elvis impersonator, and they team up to battle a ragged-looking mummy who's going around sucking people's souls? I mean, okay, it's not likely, but what if? A comedy that mostly does justice to its crazy premise, with a shamelessly lecherous performance by Campbell as the pot-bellied, jump-suited King. Thankyavurrymuch.

Daisies (1966)

DAISIES  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Vera Chytilová
    Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová, Julius Albert
Bored with their lives in a world gone bad, two young women decide to go out and break all the rules. What follows is an experiment in anarchy: funny, outrageous, subversive and completely insane. I don't know what they were smoking in Czechoslovakia back in the '60s, but some of it must've been pretty darn good. The director, Vera Chytilová, was effectively blacklisted for much of the following decade by a government that didn't want its state-sponsored filmmakers turning out movies like "Daisies".

Quote File / Take 3

"I'm not an American. I'm a nymphomaniac."
  Maria de Medeiros
  in "The Saddest Music In the World"

"I'm an elevator man. I get a paycheck. 
  I eat a lot of hot dogs. I go up and down."
  Will Sampson
  in "Insignificance"

"I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor."
  George Clooney
  in "Michael Clayton"

"I know how I look. I look like a bum. I am a bum."
  Stacy Keach
  in "Fat City"

"I am not a spy. I'm a stewardess. Really."
  Elina Löwensohn
  in "Fay Grim"

Cars (2006)

CARS  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Lasseter
To some extent, the history of America since the dawn of the 20th century is the story of cars: how we invented them, designed them, mass-produced them, bought them, sold them, junked them, restored them, showed them off, hauled ourselves around in them, tried to find places to park them, and in the process created a transportation system and a society in which not owning a car became almost impossible. This movie is the ultimate manifestation of that, an animated feature from Pixar/Disney in which humans aren't just relegated to the back seat, they don't exist at all. The cars themselves do the talking, the joking, the complaining, the flirting, the thinking, the driving, the fooling around. The story has a sleek, speedy, sticker-bedecked racer named Lightning McQueen tearing off to a big race in California, but getting stuck in Radiator Springs, a dusthole town on Route 66 that's been dying since the Interstate passed it by. Automotive life lessons are learned, as McQueen gets to know the local tire dealer (a Fiat), the motel keeper (a Porsche), the tow truck (a tow truck) and most memorably, a growly-voiced doctor with a secret racetrack past (an unlikely Hudson Hornet). Paul Newman does the voice of the Hudson. "Cars" was his last film. For a guy who devoted almost as much energy to racing as he did to making movies, and did both without appearing to take himself too seriously, it's a uniquely appropriate note to go out on.

From Noon Till Three (1976)

FROM NOON TILL THREE  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Frank D. Gilroy
    Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Douglas Fowley,
    Stan Haze, Damon Douglas, Anne Ramsey
Bronson plays an outlaw who has a nightmare about a bank robbery gone bad, then wakes up to a reality that's no less strange than the dream. With a setup like that, plausibility's a long way off, and it doesn't matter a bit. It's like a story shot through a fun-house mirror, off-kilter, offbeat, unpredictable, and in the end, literally mad, about what happens when the truth dares to intrude on a culture obsessed with celebrity and myth. Bronson never did anything else quite like it, and he appears to be having a real good time.

Anonymous (2011)

ANONYMOUS  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Roland Emmerich
    Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Sebastian Armesto
    Rafe Spall, David Thewlis, Jamie Campbell Bower,
    Joely Richardson, Trystan Gravelle, Derek Jacobi
This starts out with Derek Jacobi walking in off the street and onto a theater stage, just as the curtain's about to go up. In a brief monologue delivered straight to the audience, he suggests that the author of Shakespeare's plays might not be Shakespeare after all, and the stage behind him comes to life, opening up into a street scene in Elizabethan England. What follows is a conspiracy tale based on a theory most scholars consider fraudulent, attributing the plays to one Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. According to this account, Edward (Rhys Ifans) can't claim authorship because it's beneath his station, but he can't resist writing the plays and seeing them performed, so he has Ben Jonson deliver them to the theater anonymously. When the plays take off and audiences demand to know who wrote them, a self-promoting buffoon named Shakespeare steals the chance to claim credit and becomes the earl's unlikely and unwelcome front. At the same time, Edward's involved in some high-level intrigue over who will succeed Queen Elizabeth (an impressively aging Vanessa Redgrave), with whom he once had a passionate affair that produced an illegitimate son. So you can see there's a lot going on here, with plenty of potential for high comedy (think "Shakespeare In Love" and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead") and just as much potential for high drama (think the Cate Blanchett "Elizabeth" movies). Unfortunately, Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff can't seem to get a handle on either, much less find the balance between them. The result is a movie that looks and sounds good enough, but takes its dubious premise a little too seriously. It should be a lot more fun. What matters, as Jacobi points out at the end, isn't who wrote the plays. It's that we've still got them. Believe any suspect theory you like, we've still got the words.

Alice Adams (1935)

ALICE ADAMS  (1935)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: George Stevens
    Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, Evelyn Venable,
    Hattie McDaniel, Charlie Grapewin, Grady Sutton
Katharine Hepburn seems oddly cast in Booth Tarkington's story about a girl from a working-class family who longs to mingle and compete with the upper crust. It's all about money and status and the art of faking it, or trying to, when you don't have either. There's a lot more moonstruck girlishness here than you normally get from Hepburn, and her feistiness is more in reserve. The conclusion feels both rushed and convenient, and neither Hepburn nor director George Stevens liked the girl-gets-boy happy ending. The movie did get Hepburn one of her 12 Oscar nominations, and even playing against type, she's not to be ignored. Hattie McDaniel does a very funny bit as a surly maid hired on for a dinner that goes horribly wrong.

Cracks (2009)

CRACKS  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jordan Scott
    Eva Green, Juno Temple, Maria Valverde,
    Imogen Poots, Ellie Nunn, Adele McCann,
    Zoe Carroll, Clemmie Dugdale, Sinéad Cusack
Secrets, lies and repressed desire in the hothouse confines of a girls' boarding school. The year is 1934. The place is an island off the coast of Britain. (The movie was shot in Ireland.) Eva Green plays "Miss G", a cool, young, worldly teacher whose first-person tales of travel and adventure keep the girls entranced. The school's a well-ordered, self-contained universe, till a new student arrives, a girl from Spain. That's when things start to crack. A lot of this has the look of old, hand-tinted post cards, all muted colors and hazy light. Scott's instinct for atmosphere draws you in, even if, like some of us, you've never set foot in a girls' boarding school. And Green's Miss G is a real piece of work, with her cigarettes and darkened eyes, her outgoing, confident manner masking a paralyzing contradiction, the most deeply guarded secret of all. When she's on screen, you can't take your eyes off her. When the movie's over, she still won't quite go away.

Sahara (1943)

SAHARA (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Zoltan Korda
    Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, Dan Duryea,
    J. Carrol Naish, Rex Ingram, Lloyd Bridges
Exciting World War Two action with Bogart as a tank commander in North Africa leading a handful of Yanks and Brits (and a Frenchman and an Italian and a Sudanese) against 500 desperately thirsty Germans. Formula heroics, but it's hard to complain when the formula's done this well. A throwback to a time when we knew what the wars we were fighting were about, and Hollywood was there to remind us, just in case. Under any real battlefield conditions, Bogart's character would spend a lot more time wearing a helmet, but apparently your risk of catching a bullet in the head goes way down when you're the star of a piece like this. Jeff Bridges' dad plays one of the Brits.