Charlie Chan In Egypt (1935)

CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Arthur Ripley
    Warner Oland, Pat Paterson, Thomas Beck,
    Rita Hayworth, Stepin Fetchit, Frank Conroy
When a mummy turns up with a bullet in its chest and the paint still wet on its sarcophagus, detective Charlie Chan becomes suspicious. Ah, so. Just about every character in this movie acts like a suspect. Maybe they all done it.

Tiny Furniture (2010)

TINY FURNITURE  (2010)  ¢
    D: Lena Dunham
    Lena Dunham, Merritt Wever, Grace Dunham,
    Laurie Simmons, Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke
I've never been quite sure what constitutes a mumblecore movie, but I think this might be one. It's got a low budget and an amateur cast and a boring lead character (a young woman named Aura, just home from film school) trying to work out her boring personal issues by inflicting them on all her boring acquaintances and friends. And if Aura can't find happiness (and she can't), she'll do the next best thing: share her misery with everybody else. It's a case where you wonder whether the filmmaker herself is any different from the character she's playing. You hope not, but there's so little artistry in this, it's hard to say. Aura is somebody with absolutely no concept of personal space. She doesn't want any for herself, and it doesn't seem to matter to her that other people might. The result is a kind of suffocating intimacy that men sometimes take advantage of, and everybody - friends, relatives, lovers - steps away from sooner or later. Apparently, Aura's endless existential suffering isn't nearly as fascinating to anybody else as it is to her. And Dunham has made this really boring, irritating movie about it. The movie lasts 98 minutes, but it feels a lot longer, like a relationship that you wonder why you got into that goes bad real fast, and now you're just putting up with it till you can figure out a way to get the hell out. 98 minutes spent watching a movie like "Tiny Furniture" is way more than enough.

The Story of Mankind (1957)

THE STORY OF MANKIND  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Irwin Allen
    Ronald Colman, Vincent Price, Hedy Lamarr,
    Peter Lorre, Virginia Mayo, Dennis Hopper,
    Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx,
    Agnes Moorehead, Edward Everett Horton,
    John Carradine, Reginald Gardiner, Marie Wilson,
    Franklin Pangborn, Francis X. Bushman, Henry Daniell
The Devil (Vincent Price) and the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman) debate the role of good and evil through history, while the High Tribunal of Outer Space considers the evidence and decides the fate of the human race. Harpo Marx plays Isaac Newton. Peter Lorre plays Nero. Dennis Hopper plays Napoleon. Hedy (not Hedley) Lamarr plays Joan of Arc. You don't see history like that every day. Definitely one of the oddest things ever to come out of mainstream Hollywood: moviemaking so sincerely (and comically) misguided, it's almost surreal. For curiosity value alone, it shouldn't be missed.

Love Actually (2003)

LOVE ACTUALLY  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Curtis
    Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson,
    Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney,
    Colin Firth, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley,
    Martin Freeman, Joanna Page, Billy Bob Thornton
An all-star ensemble comedy about love and its infinite manifestations in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This is what the flacks like to call a "guaranteed crowd-pleaser," and it pretty much covers the range from laugh-out-loud funny to sitcom cute. To suggest that a cast like this deserves something more substantial is beside the point. They do, but so what? Chances are you'll have at least as much fun with it as they did, and it's Christmas, after all, so go ahead and enjoy this one. You can always forgive yourself in the morning.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mervyn Leroy
    Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell,
    Ginger Rogers, Aline MacMahon, Warren William,
    Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, Sterling Holloway
A bunch of chorus girls sharing a flat and trying not to starve as they search in vain for theater work. A producer who has a great idea for a show, but no money to put it on with. A boyish songwriter across the way who's working on some terrific tunes and just might know how to finance a Broadway production. The quintessential 1930s musical isn't the escapist fantasy you might expect, despite its flamboyant Busby Berkeley production numbers. The Depression hangs over everything, from the opening song (Ginger Rogers singing "We're In the Money" in pig Latin) to "Forgotten Man", the somber, show-stopping finale. Even with its chorus girls dangling costume coins and playing neon violins, the underlying spirit is dark.
    

Rio (2011)

RIO  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Carlos Saldanha
A vibrantly colorful animated feature about a rare bird, a blue macaw, who's captured and smuggled out of a South American jungle, ending up, improbably, in the ice-bound metropolis of Moose Lake, Minnesota. There he's taken in by a young girl and becomes her pet, best friend and soulmate, as she grows up to become the owner of a bookstore called (of course) the Blue Macaw. Eventually, both the bird and the bookseller end up back in Brazil, where the bird gets captured again, and, you know, I just realized you could probably watch this movie in the time it takes to explain the story. Anyway, it moves right along, Anne Hathaway, Jesse Eisenberg, Jamie Foxx and Tracy Morgan do some of the voices, and the songs are catchy without being annoying in the way that the songs in cartoons can sometimes be. If the little ones insist on watching and listening to the title track 10 times running, it might not even drive you crazy. Which is good. Because they might want to.

The Deadly Companions (1961)

THE DEADLY COMPANIONS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sam Peckinpah
    Brian Keith, Maureen O'Hara, Steve Cochran, 
    Chill Wills, Strother Martin, Will Wright
There's an undercurrent of madness running through this movie, which stars Brian Keith as a Civil War veteran called "Yellowleg", for the Union officer's trousers he's still wearing five years after Appomattox. Bitter, haunted and bent on revenge for a wartime atrocity that left him scarred in more ways than one, Keith has teamed up with two former rebels and gone into business robbing banks. An ironic and tragic turn of events brings them into the company of a saloon girl (Maureen O'Hara) on a journey deep into Apache territory. Peckinpah's darkly compelling first feature was a kind of bridge between the 1950s westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, and the director's own later work. (Peckinpah regular Strother Martin turns up as a preacher, and a shot of some kids playing in the dusty street as the outlaws ride by into town directly foreshadows "The Wild Bunch".) Keith's laconic, hard-bitten performance is a long way from the sitcom dad he played on television's "Family Affair".

Battle Royale (2000)

BATTLE ROYALE  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Kinji Fukasaku
    Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarô Yamamoto,
    Chiaki Kuriyama, Sôsuke Takaoka, Beat Takeshi
42 kids on a school field trip are drugged and transported to an island were they're issued survival gear and weapons and sent out to play a deadly game. The rules are simple. They're to kill each other, and the last one still breathing wins. The game lasts three days. If more than one player survives at the end, all the survivors die. An obvious forerunner to "The Hunger Games", and an impressive piece of storytelling, considering the number of characters involved. Titles keep a running count of which combatants have been killed and how many remain. Beat Takeshi Kitano, who's like Japan's Robert Mitchum, plays the deadpan ex-teacher who moderates the game. My colleague Dr. Sporgersi thought that in an American remake the role should be played by Robert Forster, but I was thinking Bill Murray.

The Hunger Games (2012)

THE HUNGER GAMES  (2012)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gary Ross
    Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth,
    Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland,
    Elizabeth Banks, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones,
    Lenny Kravitz, Amandla Stenberg, Willow Shields
A post-apocalyptic teenage gladiator movie based on the bestselling novel by Suzanne Collins and borrowing generously from the 2000 Japanese thriller "Battle Royale". Jennifer Lawrence plays the feisty heroine, Katniss Everdeen, one of 24 "tributes", young men and women picked by lot to fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses at the direction of dictatorial president Donald Sutherland. It probably helps to have read the book before seeing this, and it probably helps even more to be a teenager. There's little or no character development in the supporting roles, the editing's only marginally coherent, the script jumps and skips over parts of the story that apparently wouldn't fit in the film, and the emotional payoffs that come out of that don't feel quite earned. Which won't matter much if you're a teenager, and it is kind of refreshing to see a movie like this with a strong young woman in the lead. Fight on, Katniss Everdeen, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Naked Edge / Take 3

Kate Winslet in "Holy Smoke"
Christina Ricci in "Prozac Nation"
Kirsten Dunst in "Melancholia"
Natalie Portman in "Hotel Chevalier"
Charlize Theron in "The Cider House Rules"
Asia Argento in "Boarding Gate"
Toni Colette in "Japanese Story"
Milla Jovovich in "Resident Evil"
Neve Campbell in "When Will I Be Loved"
Gretchen Mol in "The Notorious Bettie Page"