Hook, Line and Sinker (1930)

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER  (1930)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Edward F. Cline
    Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Dorothy Lee,
    Jobyna Howland, Ralf Harolde, Hugh Herbert
A severely dated comedy about two insurance salesmen who take over the management of a rundown hotel. Wheeler and Woolsey were a successful vaudeville team whose film work hasn't exactly stood the test of time. Watch this movie and you'll see why. Director Eddie Cline had better luck (and much better material) working with Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields.

Chasing Ice (2012)

CHASING ICE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jeff Orlowski
If you've ever thought watching ice melt was boring, this movie could make you think again. If you've ever thought waiting for ice to melt was boring, well, it is, and this movie covers that, too. It's a documentary about an obsessed National Geographic photographer named James Balog, who spent several years in the early part of this century making time-lapse studies of receding glaciers, mostly in Greenland and Alaska. The footage he got is as alarming as it is spectacular. Balog's a bit of a prima donna. It's hard to tell which he loves more: being behind the lens or in front of it. But the graphic visual evidence he provides for the impact of global warming makes the reality of climate change hard to deny. The deniers would still deny that, I suppose, and some of them turn up briefly in the film, but as time goes on and the documentation piles up, their rhetoric sounds increasingly hollow. About the only reasonable conclusion you can draw is that they're crazy, stupid, or full of shit. And they're not crazy or stupid.

The Bible (1966)

THE BIBLE  (1966)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Huston
    George C. Scott, Ava Gardner, John Huston,
    Michael Parks, Ulla Bergryd, Richard Harris,
    Stephen Boyd, Franco Nero, Peter O'Toole
John Huston, who never was one to shy away from a literary adaptation, takes on the book of Genesis, from the creation through Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Noah's Ark and the story of Abraham. It's a literal interpretation and a solemn, often ponderous film, despite its all-star cast. You'd never put it in a class with Huston's best work, but as a collection of stories that place men and their dreams at the mercy of the universe - God, in this case - it stands with the rest. Old John has a good time playing Noah, in a segment that's mostly comic relief. The rest of the actors look pretty stiff, including George C. Scott, whose lustful offscreen pursuit of Ava Gardner did not endear him to Huston.

Killing Them Softly (2012)

KILLING THEM SOFTLY  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andrew Dominik
    Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn,
    James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta
When a couple of lowlife robbers knock over a high-stakes poker game, an enforcer played by Brad Pitt shows up to straighten things out. This movie goes a long way on wise-guy dialogue and style. The storytelling is secondary. So James Gandolfini gets a couple of nice, juicy scenes as an out-of-town hit man, but then his character doesn't do anything, and then he drops out of the picture completely, offscreen. And there's an extended time out from the narrative while one of the robbers shoots heroin and Dominik shows you what that looks like, both from the point of view of his partner watching him, and from behind the junkie's eyeballs. Ray Liotta plays the guy who runs the poker game. It seems he knocked over his own operation once before, so when it happens again, his life isn't worth very much. Pitt recommends just killing him, but he's overruled and a couple of thugs catch up with Ray Liotta and beat the shit out of him. It's ugly and sickening to watch, and ultimately pointless, since (as Pitt points out) Ray Liotta has to die anyway. Talk about bad luck.

James Gandolfini

(1961-2013)

A Cottage On Dartmoor (1929)

A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Anthony Asquith
    Norah Baring, Uno Henning, Hans Schlettow
In a busy, high-end salon, an intense young barber named Joe falls hard for a flirtatious manicurist named Sally, who takes up with a happy-go-lucky customer named Harry. So one day, Harry's in the chair, making eyes at Sally who's doing his nails while Joe gives him a shave, and Joe gets a little carried away with the razor. Harry survives, but Joe goes to prison, and Harry and Sally get married and move to a farm in the country and have a kid, and then Joe escapes from the prison, which is apparently just walking distance from the farm, and you just know this isn't going to end well for somebody. So, yeah, the melodramatics are kind of extreme, but for pure visual storytelling, this is a silent movie worth checking out. There are relatively few titles, it's wonderfully lit, and there are two outstanding set pieces: the sequence in the salon leading up to Joe going nuts with the razor, and one in which the spectators in a movie theater react to the picture they're watching and each other. A striking example of how good movies were starting to look as the silent era came to a close.

Quote File / Take 4

"In this life, it's got nothing to do with

  what you're good at, but who you know."

  Michael Caine

  in "Shiner"

"Life is a pain in the neck.

  That's how you recognize it."

  Richard E. Grant

  in "A Merry War"

"There's more to life than

  a little money, ya know."

  Frances McDormand

  in "Fargo"

"Life, every now and then, behaves as 

  if it had seen too many bad movies."

  Humphrey Bogart

  in "The Barefoot Contessa"

"Until you're dead, it's all life,

  so make the most of it."

  Albert Finney

  in "Breakfast of Champions"

The Band's Visit (2007)

THE BAND'S VISIT  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Eran Kolirin

    Sasson Gabai, Ronit Elkabetz, Saleh Bakri,

    Khalifa Natour, Imad Jabarin, Tarak Kopty

An Egyptian concert band, in Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural center, catches the wrong bus and ends up in the middle of nowhere, in a place that has "no Arab cultural center,  no Israeli cultural center, no culture." A deliberately paced, low-key comedy that gets the little human details just right, while mostly sidestepping regional politics. The only overt concession to the issue that underlies everything in the Middle East occurs when one of the musicians, sitting at a table in a roadside cafe, uses his uniform cap to cover a framed photograph of a (presumably Israeli) tank. The movie begins with a title announcing that the events it portrays are unimportant, and maybe that's the case. Or maybe in this part of the world, the simple notion of people sharing a quiet conversation or a piece of music, instead of bulldozing houses and blowing each other to bits, isn't so unimportant, after all.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Joseph Sargent
    Eric Braedon, Susan Clark, 
    Gordon Pinsent, William Schallert
A colossal computer - the "colossus" of the title - goes online, taking complete control of the country's national defense. Almost immediately, it develops a mind of its own, hooks up with its Soviet counterpart, and makes demands that become increasingly paranoid and alarming. Far-fetched but provocative sci-fi, a variation on the HAL-9000 segment in "2001". The chronically underused Susan Clark plays a scientist who poses as Eric Braedon's love interest.

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Judd Apatow
    Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Seth Rogen,
    Paul Rudd, Jane Lynch, Elizabeth Banks
A juvenile comedy starring Steve Carell as a middle-aged guy who lives by himself, collects action figures, rides a bicycle, has never gotten laid and thinks he never will. The story plays out in and around a big-box appliance store, where Carell's coworkers (who all have their own relationship issues) team up to give him (mostly bad) advice. Catherine Keener plays the hot-looking grandmother Carell ultimately falls for. There are some funny bits, and Keener can make almost anything worth watching, but in the end you can't help wishing the movie, like most of its characters, would just grow up.

Night Train To Munich (1940)

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Carol Reed
    Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood, Paul von Henreid,
    Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Felix Aylmer
On the eve of World War Two, a British agent slips into Germany, where he poses as a Nazi officer to help a scientist and his daughter escape across the border to Switzerland. A polished, smartly crafted thriller, with the future Henry Higgins affecting his usual easy-going arrogance as the spy. Wayne and Radford as Caldicott and Charters, the comic-relief cricket fanatics from "The Lady Vanishes", play a much more significant role in the outcome here. 

Wall-E (2008)

WALL-E  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrew Stanton
This movie opens with a futuristic vision of earth as a desiccated junk yard, a vast waste-disposal site whose only remaining inhabitants are a cockroach and a still-functioning trash compactor named WALL-E. WALL-E spends his days crushing piles of refuse into cubes and stacking those cubes into mountains. Evenings he spends watching an old VHS tape over and over again. Then one day a mechanized probe named EVE touches down, searching for signs of life, and WALL-E falls in love. The movie goes on from there, to a space station where the obese descendants of earth's last human beings live in lazy luxury, confined to mobile recliners because they're too weak and sedentary to walk. Another winning animated feature from Pixar, much of it wordless, borrowing equally from "Silent Running", "Hello, Dolly" and "2001". If you don't think there's a message tucked away in this fantasy about cute little robots in love, you're really not paying attention.

Pot o' Gold (1941)

POT O' GOLD  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: George Marshall
    James Stewart, Paulette Goddard
    Charles Winninger, Horace Heidt
Jimmy Stewart reluctantly leaves his family's small-town music store and moves to the city to help his rich Uncle Charlie run a factory there. The factory's across the street from Mrs. McCorkle's boarding house, a property the old man would like to acquire to expand his manufacturing base, and Jimmy's barely had time to set down his suitcase before he's moved into the boarding house, jammed with the house band, made the acquaintance of Mrs. McCorkle's feisty daughter (Paulette Goddard), and pitched a ripe tomato that lands splat in Uncle Charlie's face. Now he's in real trouble, but look, he's Jimmy Stewart, right? You just know things are going to work out okay in the end. A homey, unpretentious musical comedy. Stewart does some singing and plays the harmonica, but the show-stopper is Goddard's eye-catching, cross-dressing production number, "Broadway Caballero".