Jump (2012)

JUMP  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kieron J. Walsh
    Martin McCann, Nichola Burley, Richard Dormer,
    Ciaran McMenamin, Charlene McKenna, Valene Kane
It's New Year's Eve in Derry, and the whole town's out celebrating, when some money goes missing from a gangster's safe. So the thief's on the run. And the gangster's thugs are out after him. And the gangster's daughter can't decide whether or not to jump off the Derry Peace Bridge. And a couple of party girls are having a pretty good time, till a dead body ends up in the trunk of their car. And then the car goes missing. A dark, funny, time-tripping ensemble piece, based on a play and opened up considerably for the screen, about a bunch of characters who would be tripping all over themselves if they weren't so busy tripping all over each other. It's like "Pulp Fiction" with a dash of Irish fatalism and several pints of Guinness on the side.

Baby Face (1933)

BABY FACE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alfred E. Green
    Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook,
    Margaret Lindsay, Douglas Dumbrille, John Wayne
Barbara Stanwyck starts out waiting tables in her father's speakeasy, moves to the city after the joint's still explodes, and sleeps her way to the top of a giant bank. Fast-paced, pre-code melodrama, with Stanwyck in one of her signature roles. Young John Wayne plays one of her early conquests at the bank, but Stanwyck drops him cold like all the rest, as soon as he's no longer useful. What a dame.

The Descent (2005)

THE DESCENT  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Neil Marshall
    Shauna MacDonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid,
    Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, MyAnna Buring
Six women, all in their 20s with movie-star looks, meet up to go spelunking in the Appalachians. When the group's pushiest member ditches the guidebook just before they hike off to the cave, it's not a good sign. Then it turns out they're  not in the cave they'd planned to explore, but a cave nobody's ever explored. Then a cave-in seals off the passage behind them. And they start coming across caving gear from 100 years ago: The cave has been explored before. Then there are these piles of bones. Lots of them. And the "Crawlers" - predatory, humanoid creatures that look like a cross between Gollum and a grub. And they've still got to find a way out, from two miles below the surface of the earth. There are a handful of well-calculated shocks in this, the kind that come out of nowhere and make you jump out of your chair. But there's not much in the way of atmosphere, and as the movie goes on, the suspense doesn't build up, it slacks off. The action scenes are incoherent - lightning-fast cuts and dim light turn out to be a bad combination. You can sense a lot of movement and see a lot of blood, but you don't know what's going on. There's a nice, bitchy chemistry between the women, especially at the beginning, but the dirtier and bloodier they get, the harder it is to tell one from the other. By the time their ordeal is over, the survivors are all going to look like Carrie after the prom.

Rebecca (1940)

REBECCA  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alfred Hitchcock
    Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders,
    Judith Anderson, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny,
    C. Aubrey Smith, Gladys Cooper, Leo G. Carroll
After a whirlwind courtship and a quickie wedding in Monte Carlo, a young woman moves to her husband's English estate, a vast mausoleum where everybody - the servants, the guests and even her reserved, melancholy spouse - seems to prefer her deceased predecessor, the first Mrs. de Winter, to her. Showing the influence of producer David O. Selznick, Hitchcock's first American movie is more lushly romantic, and somewhat less comically mischievous, than a lot of the director's work. George Sanders, as a blackmailing car salesman, gives it a nice shot of venom toward the end, and Judith Anderson's performance as the morbidly possessive housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, remains a benchmark for cold, slithering creepiness. Winner of the Best Picture Oscar for 1940.

Joan Fontaine

(1917-2013)

Zodiac (2007)

ZODIAC  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Fincher
    Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr.,
    Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox, Chloe Sevigny,
    Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney,
    Candy Clark, James Le Gros, Clea Du Vall
A gripping detective story about the decades-long search for San Francisco's most notorious serial murderer, the real-life model for the "Scorpio" character in "Dirty Harry". Robert Downey Jr.'s a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Jake Gyllenhaal's an editorial cartoonist. Mark Ruffalo's a cop with a fondness for animal crackers. They're all drawn to the quest, but it's Gyllenhaal whose character stays with it the longest and carries the film's last 30 or 40 minutes. The newsroom scenes conspicuously resemble the newsroom scenes in "All the President's Men". The sound work effectively blends amplified background noise and soft-spoken dialogue in a way that makes you pay attention. There are even a couple of playful references to "Dirty Harry". Officially, the Zodiac killer has never been identified, but by the time the movie's over, Fincher and company have made a pretty good guess. Watching how they get there should keep you glued to your seat. 

Flashback: Peter O'Toole

    The following piece first appeared in 1994 in a DIY movie zine called Flashback. With its subject now (hopefully) knocking back a pint in the afterlife, this just seemed like a good time to dig it up and dust it off and look at it again.

   Peter O'Toole sits at a small table on the main floor of the University Book Store in Seattle. Except for an empty espresso cup and a glass ashtray holding two soggy cigarette butts, the table is bare. O'Toole wears a pale yellow shirt and a neat dark suit. He looks tired. He is.
    It's the last day of a grueling U.S. tour, a marathon round of interviews and book signings, promoting the first volume of O'Toole's memoirs, a free-wheeling account of his childhood called "Loitering With Intent". Several hundred readers and O'Toole fans holding newly purchased copies of the book stand more or less patiently in a line that winds back through the store, out the main entrance and down the sidewalk along University Way. Across the street, the marquee in front of the Varsity Theater reads WELCOME PETER O'TOOLE.
    Out on the sidewalk, four women, in their early 40s maybe, stand together waiting in line. It turns out all of them have taken the day off work to be here. They talk to each other in slightly giggly, self-conscious voices, like schoolgirls playing hookey, out on a lark.
    "I can't think of anybody else I'd do this for," one of them says. "Well, Olivier maybe, but it's a little late for that."
    Sometime later, one of them leaves the others to hold her place in line and goes into the store to look around.
    "Did you see him?" the other women ask when she gets back.
    "Yes," she replies.
    "Was it worth it?"
    "YES!"
    A torrent of excited giggles.
    Maybe because of the characters he's played, or because of the way he's played them, O'Toole, even more than most movie stars, has always seemed larger than life. Which makes it a little spooky when you find yourself stepping up to this small table, sheepishly handing over a book to be autographed, and there they all are - T.E. Lawrence, Henry II, Robinson Crusoe, Tiberius Caesar, Lord Jim, Don Quixote and who knows how many others - crackpots and maniacs, nazis and angels, kings and adventurers and crooks and movie stars - all of them staring out from the face of this tired, middle-aged man who looks for all the world like a college professor, somebody you'd expect to find teaching English literature somewhere.
    Standing in line behind the four women, I've tried to think of something profound to say when I get up to the table, but nothing brilliant has materialized, so I just say hi and O'Toole signs the book and smiles and hands it back to me and I thank him and that's it. I don't hang around long after that. I've been playing hookey myself, and it's time to get back to work. 
    There's something weird about seeing movie actors in person, after decades spent watching them on the screen. It has to do with the way that movies twist our perception of illusion and reality, turning them inside out. In a darkened theater, or a dimly lit living room, movies allow us to become children again, drawing us into a fragile, fleeting world of make-believe. We understand the deceit and accept it as part of the bargain, because on some primal, childlike level, we don't want to see the wires attached to the puppets, or the hands of the puppeteer. We want to believe in the puppet show. 
    A few nights after O'Toole's book store appearance, I slipped "Murphy's War" into the VCR, and there on the tube was this lanky, tough-talking bloke of an Irish sailor, getting shot at and bombed, repairing an airplane and teaching himself how to fly it, making torpedoes and Molotov cocktails and wreaking highly unlikely havoc on a German submarine. 
    As I settled back watching all that, the cinematic universe seemed balanced again. Reality had traded places with illusion, given up and gone home, at least till the end credits rolled around, and the figure on the screen making it happen, the tall, thin, familiar-looking man with the mad eyes and the cigarette stuck between his lips, bending reality into illusion and back again, that was Peter O'Toole.

Peter O'Toole

(1932-2013)

Babes In Toyland (1934)

BABES IN TOYLAND  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gus Meins, Charles R. Rodgers
    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charlotte Henry,
    Henry Kleinbach, Felix Knight, Jean Darling
The first screen version of the Victor Herbert musical features numerous characters from Mother Goose, plus Laurel and Hardy as toymakers hoping to keep the Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe from being evicted. When I was a kid, this would turn up on television at Christmas every year, and we never missed it. It looked like an old movie then, and it looks older now, but the storybook world it creates should still please the kiddies (except maybe the scary parts) and there's an innocence and timelessness about Laurel and Hardy that fits the material perfectly. Alternate title: "March of the Wooden Soldiers".

Born Reckless (1959)

BORN RECKLESS  (1959)  ¢ ¢ 
    D: Howard W. Koch
    Mamie Van Doren, Jeff Richards, Arthur Hunnicut,
    Carol Ohmart, Tom Duggan, Jeanne Carmen
Mamie Van Doren and her monumental superstructure hit the rodeo circuit, where Mamie wins the women's trick riding competition. She would, ya know. Mamie sings "I'm Just a Nice, Sweet, Home-Type Girl", but seems more at home strutting her stuff to "Separate the Men From the Boys". There was a reason guys in the 1950s went to see Mamie Van Doren movies, and I don't think it was to watch Mamie Van Doren sing or act.

Perfect Sense (2011)

PERFECT SENSE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Mackenzie
    Ewan McGregor, Eva Green, Connie Nielsen,
    Stephen Dillane, Ewen Bremner, Denis Lawson
A medical researcher (Eva Green) and a chef (Ewan McGregor) pick a bad time to fall in love, just as a global epidemic starts taking out people's senses, one by one. First to go is smell, followed by taste, and then, well, you'll see. Unlike "Contagion", which played off a similar story line, this movie makes no attempt to explain where the disease comes from, or how it's spread, except to say that it can't be explained. Like "Contagion", it's best moments are intimate ones, showing how ordinary people might respond to such a crisis, or be affected by it. Highlight: Green and McGregor, their taste buds neutralized, happily feast on soap and shaving cream while sharing a bath. In fact, everybody's behavior, once their sense of taste is gone and they become ravenously hungry, is pretty hilarious.

Koyaanisqatsi (1983)

KOYAANISQATSI  (1983)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Godfrey Reggio
A dazzling, impressionistic documentary that takes you on a journey from what looks like the beginning of the world to what looks like the end of it. It's all about technology and speed, how progress has made everything move faster, and faster yet. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance," and it is, and we are. Music by Philip Glass.

Into the Blue (2005)

INTO THE BLUE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Stockwell
    Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan,
    Ashley Scott, Josh Brolin, James Frain
A routine action thriller about some treasure hunters in the Bahamas who come across the remains of a sunken ship and, in the same underwater neighborhood, a sunken airplane packed with cocaine. Stockwell, who showcased Kate Bosworth in a bikini in "Blue Crush", does the same thing with Jessica Alba here. The guy knows his audience, I guess. Eye candy notwithstanding, you can catch the late Paul Walker, who hit the jackpot with the "Fast & Furious" franchise, an action star with the loose, camera-ready manner of a B-movie Brad Pitt. 

Paul Walker

(1973-2013)

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE
    D: Dario Argento                                 (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall,
    Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
An American writer living in Italy witnesses an attempted murder and gets caught up in the police investigation. Early Argento, a playfully twisted thriller that echoes Hitchcock and prefigures the Italian director's more explicit and ghoulish later work. Highlights: the opening murder sequence, with the writer trapped in the glassed-in entryway of a high-end art gallery, unable to do anything about the crime except watch it occur, and a cat-and-mouse chase through a cavernous bus barn that ends in a room filled with convention delegates, all wearing identical yellow jackets. Cat lovers might want to skip the part with the eccentric artist living in the boarded-up house.

Tony Musante

(1936-2013)

All Is Lost (2013)

ALL IS LOST  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: J.C. Chandor
    Robert Redford
In "All Is Lost", Robert Redford plays a character without a name. In the credits, he's identified simply as "Our Man". Which makes sense, when you think about it. Redford's been our man, or some projection of who we'd like to think we can be, for close to 50 years. So here he is, looking weathered but fit in his 70s, playing a guy trying to survive all by himself when his sailboat goes down in the Indian Ocean. There's next to no dialogue and Redford's the only actor in the film. He's sleeping below deck when a freight container full of shoes rams the boat, ripping a gash in the hull. From that point on, it's our man against the sea, an adventure every bit as tense and exciting (and solitary) as Sandra Bullock's space odyssey in "Gravity", another film where the stakes are high, the odds are extreme, and heroism and ingenuity might not be enough. Take it as a metaphor for humanity in general and our collective struggle to survive in the 21st century, and the feeling is even more ominous. If all is lost for our man Redford, the outlook can't be too good for the rest of us.

A-Plumbing We Will Go (1940)

A-PLUMBING WE WILL GO  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Del Lord
    The Three Stooges, Symona Boniface, Bud Jamison,
    Bess Flowers, Eddie Laughton, Dudley Dickerson
Moe, Larry and Curly are acquitted of robbing a chicken coop, do a little fishing out on the sidewalk, hide out in a magician's box, and finally end up posing as plumbers to escape the cop who's out to bring them in. Chaos takes over completely, once they start trying to fix the pipes. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Centurion (2010)

CENTURION  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neil Marshall
    Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko,
    Liam Cunningham, Imogen Poots, Noel Clarke
"Braveheart" meets "300" in a battle epic set in 2nd-century Britain, about a desperate band of Roman legionnaires being chased all over the moors by an equally warlike band of Picts. There's not much glory or grandeur here, and not even very much color, just a lot of running and fighting and skulls being split open and blood flying across the screen. It's about what happens when an empire tries to expand beyond its tactical reach, or as one Roman succinctly puts it, "We're fucked." The Romans speak English with British accents, while the Picts, who are native to Britain (Scotland, to be exact), don't speak English at all. They always were stubborn, those Scots.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT  (1965)  ¢ ¢
    D: Wojciech Has
    Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, 
    Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek, 
    Bogumil Kobiela, Zdzislaw Makiakewicz
During the Napoleonic Wars, a Spanish nobleman, who vaguely resembles Bob Hope, has a series of adventures involving ghosts, demons, gypsies, an old hermit, two Moorish princesses, the Inquisition and more. There are flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, and everybody, it seems, has a story to tell. The stories all eventually connect somehow, or maybe not, they're hard to track after a while, but either way, the movie just goes on and on and on for what seems like forever. It's in black and white. It's in Polish. It's outlandish. It's got a weird sense of humor. It probably won't keep you awake if you watch it late at night. A cult item, definitely, and a particular favorite of Jerry Garcia, which makes you wonder what Jerry was smoking at the time.

Naked Edge / Take 4

Hedy Lamarr in "Ecstasy"
Carey Mulligan in "Shame"
Sigourney Weaver in "Half Moon Street"
Shelley Duvall in "Thieves Like Us"
Geraldine Chaplin in "Welcome To L.A."
Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"
Vanessa Redgrave in "Isadora"
Helen Hunt in "The Sessions"
Ursula Andress in "Slave of the Cannibal God"
Josephine McKim 
(Maureen O'Sullivan's underwater double)
in "Tarzan and His Mate"

The Naked Monster (2005)

THE NAKED MONSTER  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Wayne Berwick, Ted Newsom
    Kenneth Tobey, Brinke Stevens, R.G. Wilson,
    John Goodwin, John Agar, Linnea Quigley,
    Robert Clarke, Michelle Bauer, Robert Cornthwaite,
    Lori Nelson, Paul Marco, Forrest J Ackerman
A federal agent, a paleontologist, a county sheriff and a long-retired Army colonel take on a giant three-eyed reptile in a goofy, "Airplane!"-style spoof of '50s monster movies. The production values are way beneath the standards of even most monster movies, with lots of footage lifted from other films, lots of old monster-movie stars in cameo roles, and lots and lots of really bad puns. Just about every aging B-movie actor who still had a pulse when the picture was shot turns up in it somewhere. (Production spanned a couple of decades, and by the time the project was completed, some of its older stars were gone.) Veteran scream queen Brinke Stevens gets the obligatory nude shower scene, and while veteran monster fighter Kenneth Tobey gets top billing, he's not moving around much, and it's Stevens, as much as anybody, who carries the film. As a mark of her status, the company name on an armored truck the monster crushes is conspicuously spelled "Brinkes".

None But the Brave (1965)

NONE BUT THE BRAVE  (1965)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Frank Sinatra
    Frank Sinatra, Clint Walker, Tommy Sands,
    Tatsuya Mihashi, Brad Dexter, Tony Bill
The only movie Frank Sinatra directed is about a small band of U.S. Marines and their Japanese counterparts, fighting it out and tenuously coexisting on an island in the Pacific during World War Two. Not a bad idea, but the script comes down a little heavy, and Tommy Sands' rabid performance as a green but gung-ho lieutenant belongs in a cartoon. The Japanese soldiers speak Japanese without subtitles. When the Japanese commander switches to English, the letter "L" takes a real beating. John Boorman covered much of the same ground more efficiently with just two antagonists in "Hell In the Pacific" (1968).

The Limits of Control (2009)

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jim Jarmusch
    Isaach de Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, Paz de la Huerta,
    John Hurt, Bill Murray, Gael Garcia Bernal, Hiam Abbass
The Jim Jarmusch tour of Spain, starring Isaach de Bankolé as a stone-faced mystery man moving diamonds around, meeting his contacts in cafes and hotels and train cars, and passing the goods and receiving his coded instructions in match boxes. The orders for his first assignment are cryptic. Go to the towers. Go to the cafe. Watch for the violin. And this: Reality is arbitrary. Is it ever. We're in Jim Jarmusch territory for sure, a meditative reflection on art, life, stillness, espresso, and what it means to be a bohemian. Where a major plot development is when de Bankolé's shiny blue suit changes to a brown one or a gray one. Where the flight he catches to Madrid is on Air Lumière, and the pickup truck he gets a ride in later on has a sign painted on the back in big white letters: LA VIDA NO VALE NADA. "I honestly have no idea whether this image came from a dream, or a film," Tilda Swinton tells de Bankolé at one point, and that's the way it is with the movie itself: trancelike, repetitive, like a dream you keep having, with endless variations, over and over again.

Ever After (1998)

EVER AFTER  (1998)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andy Tennant
    Drew Barrymore, Anjelica Huston, Dougray Scott,
    Melanie Lynskey, Jeroen Krabbé, Jeanne Moreau
Jeanne Moreau sits down with the Brothers Grimm and sets the record straight on Cinderella. In her version, Cinderella doesn't just inherit her father's love of books, but his skill with a sword and dagger. Her keen sense of justice and strong-willed gift for diplomacy help her win the heart of the prince. One of her stepsisters turns out not to be so bad after all. And the fairy godmother role is taken over by Leonardo da Vinci , who uses Cinderella as the model for one of his most famous paintings. (It's not the Mona Lisa, though she turns up here, too.) Tennant and his co-writers might've taken a few liberties with the fairy tale, but they've created what's probably the best, and undoubtedly the most literate, live-action Cinderella movie yet. Barrymore plays the lead with spirit and intelligence and not a trace of irony. She's an appealingly down-to-earth Cinderella, just the kind of girl a prince could fall for. Jeroen Krabbé as her father and Dougray Scott as the prince resemble each other just enough to make Cinderella's attraction to the prince interesting. And Anjelica Huston plays the wicked stepmother with all the warmth and charm of a coiled rattlesnake. Be ready to hiss loudly whenever she appears. 

Americano (2011)

AMERICANO  (2011)  ¢ ¢
    D: Mathieu Demy
    Mathieu Demy, Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin,
    Chiara Mastroianni, Carlos Bardem, André Wilms
This movie starts out gloomy and gets more gloomy as it goes. At first there's just a black screen and the sound of fucking. Then you see the two people doing the fucking, and they don't look like they're enjoying themselves at all. They just look sad. Then you see the same two people in bed together, sleeping, and they don't look any happier than they did before, but at least they're asleep now, so you hope for the best. Then the phone rings and the guy gets up and answers it and learns that his mother has died. Somebody's just punched his ticket to hell, by way of Paris, L.A. and Tijuana. It doesn't matter, really. You can tell he's not going to have a good time, no matter where he goes. And as long as you're watching "Americano", neither will you. Well, okay, you do get to watch Salma Hayek strip down to a fishnet bodysuit in a sleazy Tijuana bar. It's arguably the high point of the film. And even that's depressing.

The Crowd (1928)

THE CROWD  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: King Vidor
    Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach,
    Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont
King Vidor's silent melodrama about an ambitious young man who moves to the city, hoping to grab a piece of the American Dream. Some of this is a bit overdone, but Eleanor Boardman (aka Mrs. Vidor) does a nice job as the protagonist's sympathetic wife, and the camerawork still looks spectacular. James Murray, who plays the lead, was unknown at the time and he got some decent reviews, but his career never really took off. He became an alcoholic, reduced to panhandling in the street, and drowned in the Hudson River, a possible suicide, in 1936.

11:14 (2003)

11:14  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Greg Marcks
    Henry Thomas, Rachel Leigh Cook, Shawn Hatosy,
    Hilary Swank, Patrick Swayze, Barbara Hershey,
    Colin Hanks, Ben Foster, Stark Sands, Clark Gregg
The fates collide at 11:14 at night in a place where only people with real bad luck are out driving. The bad luck involves doughnuts, car keys, a bowling ball, a handgun, a dog, a dead body, some jumper cables, a gravestone and a missing penis. Really. This is like a poor man's "Crash", an ensemble piece in which everything's connected, in a story that continually doubles back on itself. No high-stakes moralizing, just a bunch of stuff that happens, resulting in all that bad luck. Ben Foster plays the unlucky joyrider whose member goes missing. Ouch.

Crash (2005)

CRASH  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paul Haggis
    Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard,
    Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Thandie Newton,
    Ryan Phillippe, William Fichtner, Shaun Toub
An Oscar-winning ensemble piece set in Los Angeles, about a bunch of people who don't much like each other, but keep having to deal with each other anyway. A television director. A hard-assed cop. A locksmith. A thief. A shopkeeper. A detective. The district attorney. And some others. All living in a virtual war zone, an ethnic melting pot they view (justifiably) with fear and antipathy. They're all more complex than they first appear, and somewhere beneath (or within) the moral compromises they make, there's a glimmer of shared humanity. The coincidences pile up in a way that's almost surreal, but the acting is powerful, and in its best moments, so is the film. "Can't we all just get along?" Rodney King might ask. Hmmm. Maybe. But according to "Crash", probably not.

The Thing (1982)

THE THING  (1982)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Carpenter
    Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart,
    Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, T.K. Carter
Kurt Russell takes on the infinitely resilient, body-invading, soul-sucking monster in a remake of the horror classic from 1951. About the only thing missing is Snake Plissken's eyepatch.

Super (2011)

SUPER  (2011)  ¢ ¢
    D: James Gunn
    Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler,
    Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion
When his beloved but zonked-out wife leaves him for a ruthless drug dealer, a severely depressed short-order cook decides to get even by reinventing himself as a superhero called the Crimson Bolt. This is sort of like "Kick-Ass", or the first part of "Spider-Man", where the superhero isn't really much of a superhero, and his costume doesn't look all that impressive, either. And reality keeps cutting in. Like when you're a crime fighter hiding behind a dumpster waiting for a crime to happen, and nothing does. Or when you're wearing your superhero mask and somebody figures out your real identity right away anyway. Or when you realize that without any actual super powers, you're going to need some real weapons to avoid getting stomped or killed, like a heavy-duty pipe wrench and some guns. There's plenty of potential for humor in this, and in the way the action skews toward real-world violence and not the romanticized, comic-book kind, but the formula's familiarity and Wilson's unsympathetic performance prevent it from being more fun. The main attraction is Ellen Page as the live-wire bookstore clerk who talks her way into becoming the Bolt's kid sidekick. Once she puts her costume on, the energy level picks up considerably.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954)

TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jacques Becker
    Jean Gabin, René Dary, Dora Doll,
    Vittorio Sanipoli, Lino Ventura, Jeanne Moreau
A sleek, tough French crime thriller starring Jean Gabin as an aging gangster with an eye on retirement, if he can just cash in the gold ingots he stashed away after his last big heist. Things don't work out the way he hopes. They never do.

Sun Don't Shine (2012)

SUN DON'T SHINE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Amy Seimetz
    Kate Lyn Shell, Kentucker Audley, Kit Gwin
Crystal and Leo are like your typical young working-class couple driving around Florida in a beat-up car. He works construction and builds cabinets on the side. She works in a bar and has a kid. The kid's with Crystal's mother while they're off on this road trip. It's hot and the two are on edge. They bicker and scrap and make up and make love. And, oh yeah, there's something else. Crystal's husband. He's dead. Crystal killed him. That's his body decomposing in the trunk. This has a little bit of "Badlands" going for it, but where Sissy Spacek was dreamy and detached, Kate Lyn Shell as Crystal is just plain nuts. With her ripe body and and a look that suggests both innocence and longing, she's just the kind of girl who might seem irresistible for a couple of hours if you met her in a bar, and your worst mistake ever to go with your hangover the next day. It's clear that Leo and Crystal honestly care for each other, even if they can't honestly show it. And it's clear that they're playing against a stacked deck. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this. One, don't get involved with a woman who's crazy, no matter how cute and adorable she looks. And two, Florida's the wrong place to be driving around with a rotting corpse in the trunk of your car.

The Longest Yard (1974)

THE LONGEST YARD  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Aldrich
    Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, Ed Lauter,
    Richard Kiel, Bernadette Peters, Michael Conrad
The cons take on the guards in an improbable game of prison-yard football. One of Burt Reynolds' best movies, tailored perfectly to his goof-off, good-ol'-boy persona. Highlights include Bernadette Peters' shatter-proof beehive and a tit-for-tat routine lifted straight from Laurel and Hardy. Old Green Bay Packer fans should keep an eye out for a balding middle linebacker who can break walls with his head. 

Ed Lauter

(1940-2013)

Screen Test / Take 4

Match the following pairs of actors with the movies in which they played brothers:

  1. Kevin Costner and Scott Glenn
  2. Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner
  3. Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall
  4. John Wayne and Dean Martin
  5. Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale
  6. Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern
  7. Viggo Mortensen and William Hurt
  8. Nick Nolte and Willem Dafoe
  9. Humphrey Bogart and William Holden
10. Ben Johnson and Warren Oates

a. "Affliction"
b. "Sabrina"
c. "A History of Violence"
d. "Silverado"
e. "True Confessions"
f. "The Wild Bunch"
g. "The King of Marvin Gardens"
h. "The Sons of Katie Elder"
i. "The Fighter"
j. "The Mountain"

Answers:
1-d / 2-j / 3-e / 4-h / 5-i / 6-g / 7-c / 8-a / 9-b / 10-f

Gravity (2013)

GRAVITY  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alfonso Cuarón
    Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris
Bullock and Clooney play astronauts stranded in space when debris from a disintegrating satellite wrecks their shuttle along with the orbiting station that could provide them with an emergency ride home. It's a white-knuckle flight from start to finish, a movie about holding on and letting go. The storytelling's efficient and the 3-D effects are appropriately dazzling, but what carries it mostly is Bullock, smart, strong, sexy, scared and in total command of the screen. She looks great in shorts and a tank top, and when she cries, she sheds weightless tears.

Mourning (2011)

MOURNING  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Morteza Farshbaf
    Kiomars Giti, Sharareh Pasha, Amir Hossein Maleki
An Iranian road movie about a mute couple and their newly orphaned nephew in an SUV on their way to Tehran. The boy's parents have just died in a car wreck, and a lot of the movie is a conversation - an argument, really - between the aunt and uncle, in sign, over who should take responsibility for the kid. It's not the Iran you see on the evening news. It's the Iran of back roads, gravel quarries, mechanical breakdowns and little roadside stores where a kid can buy a coke. In other words, the Iran that's just like everywhere else. The fact that the bickering couple look completely ordinary, and an incidental narrative that ends before anything's really resolved, enhances the sense that what you're watching is pretty close to real life. It leaves you wondering what will happen next. That's pretty close to real life, too.

Dark Victory (1939)

DARK VICTORY  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edmund Goulding
    Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart,
    Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers
Bette Davis plays a rich girl who's dying. George Brent plays the brain surgeon who loves her but can't save her. Cue the violins.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

MOONRISE KINGDOM  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Wes Anderson
    Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray,
    Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton,
    Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel
On an island off the New England coast, two kids, a boy and a girl, run away together. A local cop, the girl's parents and the boy's scout troop all go out looking for them. I'm not sure why this movie works, but it does. It's transparently artificial and way too cute. The kids are precocious. The grownups are clueless. The kids act more like adults than the adults do, in situations where you're just not used to seeing pre-teen kids, and maybe don't want to. Some viewers will find this precious, or creepy, or both. Others will find themselves laughing out loud at the good-natured absurdity of it all. It's a kids' fantasy, really, a romantic adventure that plays out not the way it would happen, but the way a kid might imagine it. The script's a collection of cliches and non sequiturs, all delivered deadpan straight. It's about family, of course. All of Wes Anderson's movies are. But what made him think he could get away with this, and how he managed to pull it off, I still don't know the answer to that one. 

The Comedians (1967)

THE COMEDIANS  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Glenville
    Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness,
    Peter Ustinov, Lillian Gish, Paul Ford,
    Raymond St. Jacques, James Earl Jones
Burton plays a hotel owner stuck with a property he can't unload in the endlessly corrupt and crumbling world of Papa Doc's Haiti. Taylor plays a diplomat's wife. Ustinov plays Taylor's husband. Paul Ford and Lillian Gish are vegetarian activists who have picked an unlikely base for their quixotic cause. Alec Guinness is a World War Two vet, a slippery character who may or may not be telling the truth, but seems to know more than he's telling. They're "the comedians," fish out of water, all out of their depth and more or less clueless in a place they don't belong. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, based on his novel, and the sense of unease that sets in from the opening minute stays consistent throughout. Unfortunately, the movie plods along for two and a half hours, slowing down especially when Burton and Taylor share the screen. Filmed in the African nation of Dahomey, which was picked because of its striking resemblance to Haiti. Not much of a recommendation for Dahomey, if you ask me.

Best Worst Movie (2009)

BEST WORST MOVIE  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Stephenson
A documentary in which the cast members of "Troll 2" reconnect 18 years later to celebrate (or cash in on) what some experts consider the worst film of all time. They cover a wide range, from the grandstanding dentist who played the dad, to the delusional recluse who played the mom, to the still-aspiring actress who played their daughter and can't get work now because her resume includes "Troll 2". It's a revealing group portrait, funny, affectionate and a little sad, directed by the guy who as a young boy played the kid who saw the goblins. If you want to find out just how bad a movie can be, see "Troll 2". If you want to know what happened to the people who made it that way, including the guy who played his part in the film on a day pass from a mental institution, see "Best Worst Movie".

Troll 2 (1990)

TROLL 2  (1990)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Claudio Fragasso
    Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey,
    Connie McFarland, Robert Ormsby, Deborah Reed
A young boy moves to a small farming community called Nilbog with his mom, dad and older sister, but his dead grandpa keeps turning up, warning him about goblins. Nobody believes him at first, but the townspeople do act mighty strange, and the neon green icing on all the food they keep pushing toward the newcomers seems a little suspect, too. This apparently has nothing to do with the first "Troll" movie, but it does have a significant cult reputation as the worst film ever made. That could be argued either way - the collected works of Ed Wood and Doris Wishman are still out there, after all - but there's no denying that "Troll 2" is amazingly, laughably bad. Mere words can't do justice to this one. See for yourself. 

I Wish (2011)

I WISH  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hirokazu Kore-eda
    Koki Maeda, Ohshirô Maeda, Joe Odagiri,
    Nene Ohtsuka, Kirin Kiki, Isao Hashizume
Three Japanese schoolboys skip out of class and embark on an adventure, believing (or at least hoping) that if they go to the spot where two bullet trains cross paths and make a wish as the trains go by, a miracle will happen. One of them wants to play baseball like Ichiro. One wants to marry the school librarian. One wants to reunite his family. It can take a while to adjust to the pace of this. The storytelling is leisurely, as Kore-eda's camera follows the boys around, showing how they live, what they think and talk about, and what they do. You wonder sometimes if the kids are even acting, or just being themselves. It's a sweet little glimpse at what it's like to be a kid, in that fleeting time you get when you really are a kid, old enough to be doing stuff on your own, but before hormones take over, and it's time to start to grow up, and everything goes to hell.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990)

WELCOME HOME, ROXY CARMICHAEL  (1990) 
    D: Jim Abrahams                                                  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Winona Ryder, Jeff Daniels, Frances Fisher,
    Laila Robins, Thomas Wilson Brown, Graham Beckel
Clyde, Ohio, is a dot-on-the-map town west of Cleveland, where, according to this movie, everybody's emotional development stalls out at about age 15. There really is a Clyde, Ohio, and whether the people there are all small-minded and shallow, I couldn't say, but that's the way the film portrays them. The story has the good citizens of Clyde making much civic ado over the imminent return of one Roxy Carmichael, a girl who escaped as a teenager 15 years before, vowing not to come back till she was famous. Now she is, mainly because somebody wrote a hit song about her, and her reputation in Clyde has reached the level of myth. Everybody's affected by it. Jeff Daniels plays Roxy's old boyfriend, now married with a couple of kids. Winona Ryder plays the high-school outcast who believes she's Roxy's daughter. Laila Robins plays a sympathetic guidance counselor, and there are a couple of sweet scenes between Ryder and Thomas Wilson Brown as the schoolmate who's not-so-secretly crazy about her. The other actors, with minor variations, are stuck playing all those emotional 15-year-olds. That's deliberate, apparently, like the stereotyping you'd find in a fairy tale, but outside of movies and fairy tales, not everybody's like that. They can't be. Not even in Clyde, Ohio.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS  (2012)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin McDonagh
    Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson,
    Sam Rockwell, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish,
    Harry Dean Stanton, Long Nguyen, Olga Kurylenko
This movie made me wonder whether it's a sign of desperation when a screenwriter writes a script about a desperate screenwriter. The screenwriter in "Seven Psychopaths" is a guy named Martin, who's trying to come up with a script to go with the title "Seven Psychopaths". Coincidentally, the real screenwriter who wrote the script for "Seven Psychopaths" is a guy named Martin. Colin Farrell plays the Martin in the movie, and what happens is, he doesn't just write the script he's working on, he lives it. The seven psychopaths include Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell as a pair of dognappers, Tom Waits as a serial killer who specializes in killing other killers, Harry Dean Stanton as a vengeful Quaker, and Woody Harrelson as a gangster who's much too attached to his defective handgun. McDonagh also wrote and directed "In Bruges", and this movie has the same wise-guy vibe going for it, but the story's not as tight, and some scenes, like the ones where Harrelson threatens to shoot the film's only black characters, just seem pointless and mean. You could watch it for Waits and Walken, if nothing else, but if McDonagh's next project has anything to do with a desperate screenwriter, we'll know he's really desperate.

12 Monkeys (1995)

12 MONKEYS  (1995)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Terry Gilliam 
    Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt,
    Christopher Plummer, Frank Gorshin, David Morse
A mind-bending science-fiction movie exploring the psychological territory between insanity and time travel. Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a convict who starts out in the future (his present) with a shot at a pardon if he "volunteers" to go back to 1996 to help prevent an epidemic that will otherwise wipe out all human life. Only Cole gets dispatched back to 1990 instead, where he's arrested for violent behavior, and when he starts telling people he's from the future, and how there's going to be an epidemic connected to a conspiracy involving (you guessed it) 12 monkeys, he's locked up in a mental institution. There he falls in with a fellow patient played by Brad Pitt (acting crazy and having a real good time), who, it turns out, has something to do with the 12 monkeys. It's a mystery that keeps you wondering, even after Cole comes under the care of a shrink (Madeleine Stowe), who's sympathetic, but doesn't believe his time-travel story, at least not right away, and by the end, when it all kind of comes together, you're in "Vertigo" territory. It's one of Terry Gilliam's best movies, an example of what he can do when his visual extravagance serves the story, and not the other way around. David Webb Peoples, who wrote Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven", cowrote the script.

Beware of Mr. Baker (2012)

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Bulger
Of all the pharmaceutical adventurers who made it out of the 1960s, it's hard to imagine anybody less likely to have survived into the 21st century than Ginger Baker. Even in an era of epic drug use, Baker's consumption was legendary. Did he really shoot heroin into his eyeballs? Maybe not, but take a look at his eyes. So here's Baker in this documentary at about age 70, not only kicking and breathing, but as cranky and crazy as ever. Chain-smoking in an easy chair in his home in South Africa, Baker looks back, in a manner that's not the least bit mellow, on his career as one of the world's most accomplished and explosive drummers, and a personal life that's about as tidy as a freeway wreck. Film clips across the years show what he could do behind a drum kit. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Charlie Watts and Steve Winwood are among the witnesses. You get a better sense of Baker as a person than as a musician here, and the man emphatically, defiantly is who he is, take it or leave it, like it or not. You can't help admiring that in a way, but it's not clear Baker cares one way or another. It's startling when he chokes up talking about the percussionists he admires, but his attitude toward everybody else seems to be a well-aimed "Fuck off." It's not hard to see why his bands didn't last very long and other musicians and most of his wives walked away. He might've been a reckless, self-immolating asshole, and maybe still is, but he sure could play the hell out of a drum.

The Teacher (1974)

THE TEACHER  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Howard Avedis
    Angel Tompkins, Jay North, Barry Atwater,
    Anthony James, Marlene Schmidt, Quinn O'Hara
Angel Tompkins plays your average high school teacher who looks like a Playboy model, drives a Corvette, and spends her days off sunbathing topless on a boat in the middle of the harbor. Dennis the Menace plays the student she hooks up with for a little post-graduate study. It looks like he's got a lot to learn, but maybe she grades on a curve. 

Movie Star Moment: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp
in "City Lights" (1931)

    "City Lights" is the Charlie Chaplin movie where the Little Tramp befriends a blind flower girl who mistakenly believes he's a millionaire. Unwilling to reveal his true identity, he goes along with the ruse, while trying to raise the money to pay for an operation that can restore her sight. A lot of great comedy comes out of that, but what makes the film transcendent is its final image, an exquisitely simple shot that could make the most stone-hearted moviegoer choke up. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, keep a handkerchief handy and watch "City Lights".

Roller Town (2012)

ROLLER TOWN  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andrew Bush
    Mark Little, Kayla Lorette, George William Basil,
    Pat Thornton, Adam Bayne, Brian Heighton
Kids on skates band together and fight back when a gangster and a disco-hating mayor try to close down their beloved roller rink. A silly, outrageous, good-natured spoof on the disco-era artifact "Roller Boogie", and the greatest roller-disco comedy shot entirely in Halifax, Nova Scotia, you'll ever see. Probably. The sketch comedy troupe Picnicface cooked this one up. Keep a finger on the pause button for the end credits.

Stalker (1979)

STALKER  (1979)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrei Tarkovsky
    Alexander Kaidanovsky, Nikolai Grinko,
    Anatoly Solonitsin, Alice Friendlich
Somewhere in an unnamed country, there's a place called "the Zone". Armed guards patrol its perimeter, allowing nobody in. The guards themselves are afraid to go in there. Inside the Zone, there's said to be a room where, if you can find it, your innermost wish becomes reality. Three men break through the guarded border and enter the Zone. One's a writer. Another's a professor. The third's a "stalker", a kind of underground tour guide who gets paid to escort travelers surreptitiously into, through and out of the Zone. A demanding, ambiguous, sci-fi puzzle, long on talk and short on action, a slog to sit through but great to look at. The scenes outside the Zone are in sepia. Everything in them looks grimy and wet, a primitive industrial landscape in an advanced state of decay. The Zone doesn't look much more inviting, but at least it's in color, and the difference is startling. Some puzzles aren't meant to be solved, and this might be one of them, but if you enjoyed trying to wrap your head around Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life", or Lars von Trier's "Melancholia", or Tarkovsky's "Solaris", you might like "Stalker", too. Geoff Dyer's "Zona", published in 2012, is a book-length meditation on this film.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (2012)

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andrew Adamson
    Erica Linz, Igor Zaripov, 
    Lutz Halhubner, John Clarke
A girl goes to the circus, where she follows an aerialist down a rabbit hole and into a dream world that's ten times stranger than the circus. That's it for the story, but it's enough to string together a bunch of Cirque du Soleil's greatest hits. Some sequences are more striking than others, but they all exhibit a keen grasp of the laws of physics, an eye-popping sense of spectacle, and a willingness to explore what amazing things the human body can do. Drop down the rabbit hole yourself, and see.

Hook (1991)

HOOK  (1991)  ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Spielberg
    Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts,
    Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith, Caroline Gooodall,
    Charlie Korsmo, Amber Scott, Gwyneth Paltrow
Steven Spielberg's sequel to "Peter Pan" (as if one was needed), with Peter now a grownup dad returning to Neverland to save his children from the clutches of Captain Hook. The trouble is, Peter doesn't remember anything from his life as a Lost Boy. He no longer knows how to crow or fly. He has to learn all over again. Robin Williams (looking constipated) plays Peter. Julia Roberts (nice legs) plays Tinkerbell. Dustin Hoffman (ugly wig) plays Hook. Maggie Smith plays Wendy as an old woman and Bob Hoskins plays Smee. The setup has some potential, but Spielberg piles on enough cuteness to out-Disney Disney, and that's too much. Kids should like it. Grownups beware.

Easy Rider (1969)

EASY RIDER  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dennis Hopper
    Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson,
    Luke Askew, Luana Anders, Sabrina Scharf,
    Karen Black, Toni Basil, Robert Walker
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play Wyatt and Billy, a couple of 20th-century outlaws who make some money smuggling cocaine out of Mexico and take off across the U.S. on motorcycles, heading for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Hopper's groundbreaking first feature became a cinematic anthem for the 1960s, filled with late-'60s cliches, but played with a conviction that few other movies from or about the period seem to get. Nicholson's star-making performance as a loquacious small-town lawyer should bring a knowing grin to anybody who remembers smoking pot for the first time, and there's some great rock & roll on the soundtrack. Wyatt and Billy might be free-wheeling free spirits, but they're not entirely likeable, and they're a distinctly odd couple when it comes to temperament and style. One's a fashionably decked-out narcissist. The other's a ratty, unkempt sociopath. They don't think much beyond themselves, and their behavior sometimes reflects that. They complain about not being able to get a room in a cheap motel, but when they're turned away from a cheap motel late at night, you suspect it's got less to do with their bikes and long hair than the fact that they're acting like assholes. Some might see them as martyrs, but they're sure as hell not saints, and that gives the movie's dreamy pessimism a subversive, misanthropic edge. Still, nobody looked cooler back then than Peter Fonda on a motorcycle, and nothing distilled counterculture rebellion to a more succinct level of expression than Hopper's defiant, one-fingered salute. The violent, senseless conclusion can still make your blood run cold.

Karen Black

(1939-2013)