Moneyball (2011)

MONEYBALL  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bennett Miller
    Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman,
    Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop
This is like baseball's version of "The Social Network", about how a failed ballplayer named Billy Beane changed the game, or tried to, as general manager of the Oakland Athletics. It's not about the game played on the diamond as much as the game played away from it, in offices and on computers and over the phone. The A's were (and are) a small-market team, and what Beane did to make them competitive was to use statistical analysis to evaluate players and calculate their value on the field and in trades. Brad Pitt plays Beane with movie-star ease and an ever-ready spit cup. (Beane chews.) Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the A's crotchety, old-school manager, Art Howe. Jonah Hill plays the fresh-faced econ grad who runs the spread sheets and crunches the numbers. It can be weird to find yourself sympathizing with the guys who get paid to reduce men to their on-base percentages and walk-to-strikeout ratios. But that's the way the game is played these days, and Billy Beane, who still hasn't won a World Series with the A's, had a lot to do with that.

Deep Throat (1972)

DEEP THROAT  (1972)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Gerard Damiano
    Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems,
    Carol Conners, Dolly Sharp
The legendary porno flick, about a frustrated young woman who has a clitoris where her tonsils ought to be, launched a tidal wave of hardcore features in the 1970s and made Linda Lovelace a household name. It's a long way from great art (or even a good movie), but at least the picture tries to tell a story, and there's some humorous foreplay in the scenes between Linda and Harry Reems as Dr. Young, the conveniently horny physician who identifies and treats her affliction. In a memoir years later, Lovelace claimed she was drugged and coerced into making the film, a disturbing allegation that can't be substantiated by her performance.

Harry Reems

(1947-2013)

Howl (2010)

HOWL   (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
    James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm,
    Mary Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, Bob Balaban,
    Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, Aaron Tveit
James Franco plays Allen Ginsberg, writing and reflecting on his famous (and once infamous) poem. It's hard to imagine now how poetry could cause such a stir, but the obscenity trial that followed the publication of "Howl" in 1955 was a significant chapter in the ongoing battle between censorship and the arts. Epstein and Friedman are documentarians, and the movie plays out on at least four tracks: the trial, Ginsberg chain-smoking and composing at his typewriter, Ginsberg in a taped interview expounding on his life and work, and animated sequences that take off from and play around with the images in the poem. Movies haven't done a great job of capturing the Beats, who shared a collective disregard for conventional narrative. "Howl", which doesn't follow a conventional narrative, either, might be the best Beat movie yet: outside the lines and outside the box, the film and its subject both at odds with the rules.

Carry On Jack (1963)

CARRY ON JACK  (1963)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gerald Thomas
    Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams, Juliet Mills,
    Charles Hawtrey, Donald Houston, Percy Herbert,
    Jim Dale, Patrick Cargill, Peter Gilmore
The "Carry On" gang gets pressed into service to fight the Napoleonic Wars, and the French and Spanish don't stand a chance. Then again, neither does the Royal Navy. It's like "Captain Horatio Hornblower" and "Damn the Defiant!" and "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." Only, you know, a lot sillier.

Haywire (2012)

HAYWIRE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Stephen Soderbergh
    Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum,
    Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas
"You're out of your element, aren't you?" Michael Fassbender asks Gina Carano at one point in "Haywire". She is, in more ways than one. They're at a swank party, and neither Carano nor the character she plays looks like somebody who feels at home in a slinky black dress. Fortunately, Carano's character, an assassin named Mallory, spends a lot less time posing at parties than she does wasting bad guys. It's a formula B-movie thriller (with an A-movie budget and cast), but Soderbergh has enough skill and respect for the genre to get it right. Going against the trend toward action scenes that favor speed over coherence, he dares to slow the chases down with longer takes that let you know where the characters are and what's going on. The locations are Dublin and Barcelona. Ewan McGregor sports the ugliest haircut he's had since "Trainspotting". Fassbender does an acceptable pseudo-James Bond. And Carano, a mixed martial-arts champion, kicks ass with more authority than most of her spindly, action-star counterparts. Angelina Jolie? Seriously, this girl would kill her.

White Fawn's Devotion (1910)

WHITE FAWN'S DEVOTION  (1910)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Young Deer
    Princess Red Wing
An English trapper living in a log cabin with his Indian wife and their young daughter learns that he's come into a fortune, but he has to go away to get it. The Mrs. doesn't like that idea, and when he insists on going anyway, she stabs herself. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the trapper killed her, and the other Indians are about to kill him, when the wife shows up in the nick of time to save the day (or at least the trapper), because she wasn't dead, after all. That's the story and that's the film, which is thought to be the oldest existing movie directed by a Native American. According to the notes in the DVD package, James Young Deer made more than 100 pictures for Pathé between 1910 and 1913, but he was never credited on screen for them and most of his films from the period are lost. A forgotten pioneer. I'm not sure what it says about the movie's authenticity, but it looks like the actor playing the Indian chief is wearing a union suit. Complete title: "White Fawn's Devotion: A Play Acted By a Tribe of Red Indians In America".

Room In Rome (2010)

ROOM IN ROME  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Julio Medem
    Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso
Sex, lies and room service. A lesbian romance about two women who spend a night together in a hotel room in Rome, where they talk and make out and talk and make out and talk and make out and talk. For about 90 percent of the movie they're naked, and both actresses are hot. In fact, it's hard to imagine anybody with a pulse not being turned on by this. It's a good movie, too. At least that's my opinion. It's possible I was distracted by something. Watch it and see what you think.

Listomania / Take 3

Movies Woody Allen made with Diane Keaton:

     "Play It Again, Sam"
     "Sleeper"
     "Love and Death"
     "Annie Hall"
     "Interiors"
     "Manhattan"
     "Radio Days"
     "Manhattan Murder Mystery"

Movies Woody Allen made with Mia Farrow:

     "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy"
     "Zelig"
     "Broadway Danny Rose"
     "The Purple Rose of Cairo"
     "Hannah and Her Sisters"
     "Radio Days"
     "September"
     "Another Woman"
     "Crimes and Misdemeanors"
     "New York Stories"
     "Alice"
     "Husbands and Wives"
     "Shadows and Fog"

Movies Clint Eastwood made with Sondra Locke:

     "The Outlaw Josie Wales"
     "The Gauntlet"
     "Every Which Way but Loose"
     "Bronco Billy"
     "Any Which Way You Can"
     "Sudden Impact"

The Small Back Room (1949)

THE SMALL BACK ROOM  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
    David Farrar, Kathleen Bryon, Jack Hawkins,
    Michael Gough, Cyril Cusack, Sidney James
Early in the Second World War, a research scientist with a bum leg battles personal demons while trying to figure out how to defuse a new German bomb. For long stretches, Powell and Pressburger leave the war completely, as the movie zeroes in on the protagonist's bouts with depression and alcohol. The climactic scene, in which he has to dismantle an explosive device using not much more than guts, guesswork and a couple of pipe wrenches, is as intense as anything in "The Hurt Locker". Nobody had those space-age, bomb-proof suits back then, either.

Les Miserables (2012)

LES MISERABLES  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tom Hooper
    Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway,
    Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks,
    Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter
The screen version of the hit musical based on Victor Hugo's epic novel, starring Hugh Jackman as the heroic, beleaguered Jean Valjean and Russell Crowe as his implacable nemesis, Inspector Javert. It's long and sometimes lacks subtlety and its bigness isn't always an asset, but its best moments pack a punch, and its vision of what crushing poverty in 19th-century France might've looked like is not pretty at all. Distinguished by the fact that all the singing was done by the actors on set, and most of the script is sung. The cast handles the challenge well enough, some with more skill than others, the emotional show-stopper being Anne Hathaway's aching rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream". Good luck trying to stay dry-eyed through that.

Champagne (1928)

CHAMPAGNE  (1928)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alfred Hitchcock
    Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin,
    Theo von Alten, Gordon Harker
The fortunes of a party-loving heiress take a tumble when she learns her father has lost everything in the stock market. A routine silent melodrama with some nice visual touches and a lively lead performance by British flapper Betty Balfour. It's a long way from terrible, but with a script that was being cobbled together on the spot, it lacks the director's usual premeditated control. Hitchcock hated working on it, and considered it his least significant work.

The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002)

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alan Rudolph
    Campbell Scott, Hope Davis,
    Denis Leary, Robin Tunney
Scott and Davis play an upper-middle-class couple whose lives revolve around their shared dental practice, their three young daughters, their 10-year-old marriage and, in the time covered by the story, a communal case of the flu. When he starts to suspect that she's having an affair, his imagination goes into overdrive and an apparition in the form of an obnoxious patient (a seedy-looking Denis Leary) moves in to provide a cynical running commentary and a lot of unsolicited advice. Some of this is funny, but not all of it. Usually you can tell what's fantasy from what isn't, but not always. Mostly what you get is an intelligently crafted look at two ordinary people in all their complexity and imperfection, trying to muddle through a difficult time. It's Rudolph at his most accessible, a quiet celebration of marriage and raising kids as the most daunting, rewarding and heroic thing most of us will ever do. And watch your step, okay? One of the girls just threw up on the floor. 

Earth vs. the Spider (1958)

EARTH VS. THE SPIDER  (1958)  ¢ ¢
    D: Bert I. Gordon
    Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Gene Persson,
    Gene Roth, Hal Torrey, Mickey Finn
And it's a damn big spider, too.