THE RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (1975)
D: Blake Edwards ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
Peter Sellers, Christopher Plummer, Catherine Schell,
Herbert Lom, Victor Spinetti, Burt Kwouk
The second entry in the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers/Pink Panther franchise (or the third, if you count "A Shot In the Dark"), with Inspector Clouseau again stumbling after the world's most famous diamond. This is the Pink Panther movie where a man gets his fingers broken on the installment plan, and Chief Inspector Dreyfus, trying to light a cigarette with a loaded revolver, accidentally shoots off his nose. Clouseau's fractured French accent adds a whole new dimension to words like "room", "license", and "monkey".
Herbert Lom
(1917-2012)
A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: David Cronenberg
Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen,
Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon
Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud duke it out on the intellectual battlefield of early 20th-century psychoanalysis. So Freud pontificates and smokes a lot of cigars (because sometimes a cigar is just, well, you know . . .), and Jung hooks up with a patient named Sabina Spielrein (the human skeleton known as Keira Knightley), who becomes a psychoanalyst herself. (She also likes to be spanked.) It's a movie of ideas, a lot of it just people talking, or exchanging letters, and it holds your interest, even if, like some of us, you've somehow made it through school and life without ever cracking a psych book. Fassbender and Mortensen are the essence of restraint, while Knightley plays Spielrein with intense physicality, twisting her limbs into knots and sticking her chin out so far, you wonder how she managed not to dislocate her jaw. The spanking scenes are notably discreet.
THE INDIAN TOMB (1921) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Joe May
Conrad Veidt, Olaf Fönss, Mia May,
Bernard Goetzke, Paul Richter, Erna Morena
Epic German melodrama in which Conrad Veidt (looking like Vladimir Putin doing a Rudolph Valentino impression) plays an Indian maharaja who enlists a back-from-the-dead yogi (Bernard Goetzke, looking like Charlton Heston doing a Boris Karloff impression) to bring him an architect to design and build a fabulous tomb for his beloved princess. It turns out the princess isn't dead yet, just locked up for having an affair with a British adventurer (Paul Richter, looking like T.E. Lawrence doing a T.E. Lawrence impression), and the architect has to leave England without telling his fiancee, who finds out anyway and sails to India to track him down. So the raj sends the tiger hunters out after the T.E. Lawrence guy and the architect contracts leprosy and the fiancee has to sacrifice herself to save him and the servant girl who runs errands for the princess does a belly dance and then a deadly snake bites her, and the architect and the fiancee and the princess all escape and there's a big climactic chase over the water and up some cliffs to a suspension bridge over a canyon, because there has to be a suspension bridge in a movie like this. That might make the picture sound more exciting than it is, but some of it's not bad, in a long, slow, over-the-top silent movie way. The production values are impressive, and Goetzke has a strange, commanding presence as the yogi. Veidt's as effectively understated as he is miscast, while the stocky, graying Fönss and the hefty, matronly May, as the dashing young architect and his adventurous would-be bride, are simply miscast. Fritz Lang co-wrote the script.
BETTER THAN SEX (2000) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jonathan Teplitzky
David Wenham, Susie Porter,
Catherine McClements, Kris McQuade
A whimsical romantic comedy about two people who meet at a party and agree to a simple one-night stand that turns out to be more than they bargained for. There's an easy, natural chemistry between the leads that's especially impressive when you consider how much of the picture they spend without much of anything on. Wenham's got the ruggedly handsome features of a catalog model - well, okay, a model who hasn't shaved for a couple of days - and Porter has an adventurous, lived-in look, an early Jean Seberg haircut and a million freckles, all of them on display. I wouldn't take bets on these two characters being together six months on. They never get past the lust phase here. But for the three days the movie covers in its 80-odd minutes, they sure have a good time.
BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965) ¢ 1/2
D: Max Hunter
Mickey Hargitay, Louise Barrett,
Walter Brandi, Rita Klein
Lame-brained horror movie about a camera crew and four dishy models who invade a medieval castle for a photo shoot, only to be terrorized by a muscle-bound sadist in red tights and a Phantom mask. Down in the dungeon, they're subjected to hideous tortures, including the rack, the iron maiden, the boiling-oil torture, the icy-water torture, the cage-suspended-over-a-firepit torture, the blonde-chained-to-the-top-of-a-brick-oven-wearing-only-a-pair-of-black-panties torture, and watching Mickey Hargitay act. The horror.
FESTIVAL EXPRESS (2003) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Bob Smeaton
A booze-fueled train ride across Canada with Janis Joplin, the Band and the Grateful Dead. Were those folks ever that young? Were we?
Burt Lancaster as Captain Vallo
in "The Crimson Pirate" (1952)
It's a moment in time, a cinematic prelude, after the Warner Bros. logo appears and before the opening credits. A man swings out on a rope, high above the deck of a tall sailing ship, starting on one yardarm and landing on another. The man is bare-chested, with chiseled features and great, gleaming teeth. He moves with the grace and agility of an acrobat, which he is. In medium close-up, he speaks straight into the camera: "Gather round, lads and lasses, gather round! You've been shanghaied aboard the last voyage of the Crimson Pirate. Remember, on a pirate ship, in pirate waters, in a pirate world, ask no questions. Believe only what you see." Then he swings out on the rope again, landing on another yardarm. "No!" he says, correcting himself. "Believe half of what you see!" The man is Burt Lancaster, at his absolute swashbuckling peak. That's really him up there doing the stunt work, and nobody, with the possible exception of Douglas Fairbanks, brought more full-blooded physicality to movies like this. Cue the music. Roll the credits. Bring on the pirates. The adventure's about to begin.
THE KILLERS (1946) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Robert Siodmak
Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien,
Albert Dekker, William Conrad, Charles McGraw
Neatly plotted film noir about a payroll robbery and its aftermath, based partly on the Hemingway short story. Lancaster plays a doomed ex-boxer, Gardner's the femme fatale, and they get top billing, but the actor who holds the piece together is Edmond O'Brien as the cocky insurance investigator who cracks the case. Flashbacks tell the story, not always in chronological order. (The nonlinear story structure would not be lost on Quentin Tarantino.) The double-crossers all get double-crossed here. Lancaster's first film.
THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Terrence Malick
Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn,
Hunter McCracken, Fiona Shaw, Irene Bedard
Terrence Malick takes on life, death, God, families, the origin of the universe, evolution, the hereafter and everything in between, all playing out from (and back into) the story of a middle-class family in 1950s Texas. Slow going at times, but a head trip, for sure. The only way to understand it all would be to crawl inside Terrence Malick's skull, and the only one who can do that is Terrence Malick. It's like "The Fountain" meets "Contact" meets "2001". They're all kind of barking up the same tree.
CARNY (1980) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Kaylor
Jodie Foster, Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson,
Meg Foster, Kenneth McMillan, Craig Wasson,
Bert Remsen, John Lehne, Elisha Cook Jr.
Young Jodie plays a bored small-town waitress who runs off and joins a traveling carnival, hooking up with a couple of midway hustlers played by Busey and Robertson. A dramatized slice of carnival life, including a peak at the freak show. The stars are worth watching, especially the effortlessly low-key Robertson, but the movie never catches up with its potential. Unexpected highlight: an acoustic blues number performed by a 600-pound mass named Jelly Belly Harold.
