Searching For Sugar Man (2012)

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Malik Bendjelloul
A documentary that plays like a mystery, about a singer-songwriter from Detroit named Rodriguez, who released two critically acclaimed albums in the early 1970s and then abruptly disappeared. The albums went nowhere commercially, but somebody slipped the music into Apartheid-era South Africa, where it really took off, under the radar and beyond the reach of the repressive minority government. Meanwhile, rumors surfaced that Rodriguez had killed himself on stage, either with a gun or by setting himself on fire, but nobody really knew anything about him. Two guys decided to find out, and did, and this movie is the story of their quixotic quest, and more than that, the story of Rodriguez, who's had a career arc so improbable, it plays like fiction. You do wonder about his South African fan base, which appears to be 100 percent white, and while his three daughters are interviewed extensively, their mothers conspicuously are not. Numerous witnesses wonder out loud about why Rodruguez failed to gain any kind of following in the U.S. By the time the movie's over, and you've spent close to 90 minutes listening to his songs, you'll wonder about that, too.

Of Mice and Men (1939)

OF MICE AND MEN  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lewis Milestone
    Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., Betty Field,
    Charles Bickford, Bob Steele, Noah Beery Jr.
For all the monster movies he appeared in over the years, Lon Chaney Jr. gave his most frightening performance as Lennie, the simple-minded giant, in John Steinbeck's enduring pastoral tragedy. Lennie and his pal George (Burgess Meredith) are itinerant ranch hands, moving from job to job during the Depression and dreaming about someday owning a little spread of their own. But Lennie's childlike mind and outsized strength always land him in trouble, and sooner or later, he and George are forced to move on. Other screen adaptations have come along since, and Nicol Williamson, Randy Quaid and John Malkovich have all taken on the role, but none of them have matched the scary simplicity Chaney brought to Lennie. Throw in Milestone's direction, Aaron Copland's music and Meredith doing some of his best work, too, and this version is pretty much definitive. 

Looper (2012)

LOOPER  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Rian Johnson
    Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt,
    Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo, Paul Dano
In the present (according to most people), time travel hasn't been invented yet. But 30 years in the future (according to this movie), it will have been. To take advantage of that phenomenon, the gangsters of the future (like Jeff Daniels) hire specialized assassins called loopers (like Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to hang out in the present (30 years ago their time) and perform hits on people who have been sent back in time for the sole purpose of being killed and disposed of. Confused yet? Then think what it's like for Gordon-Levitt when he comes face-to-face with his latest target, who turns out to be himself, only 30 years older and played by Bruce Willis. As Willis explains to Gordon-Levitt over coffee and eggs at their favorite greasy-spoon diner, trying to explain how this time-travel stuff works would take way too long, so periodically director Rian Johnson cuts to the chase, so an annoying little kid (played by Pierce Gagnon) can show off his telekinetic powers, and many high-powered guns can be fired. Personally, I wish they had taken a little more time to explain the time-travel stuff. I'm not sure it all adds up. But Willis, looking a little more solidly middle-aged than he has up till now, can still gun down the bad guys (whatever time zone they're from), and Gordon-Levitt, playing the killer who will someday be Bruce, does a pretty fair Bruce Willis impersonation.

Jungle Manhunt (1951)

JUNGLE MANHUNT  (1951)  ¢ ¢
    D: Lew Landers
    Johnny Weissmuller, Sheila Ryan,
    Bob Waterfield, Lyle Talbot
Jungle Jim, a dishy babe who should learn how to swim, an ex-football hero and Tamba the Chimp take on a fierce tribe of skeleton men. A juvenile adventure from Johnny Weissmuller's post-Tarzan period, in which a shark battles an octopus, two giant lizards battle each other, and Johnny delivers lines like "Hand me the dynamite," and "Remember the flaming arrow." Or maybe it's "Remember the dynamite," and "Hand me the flaming arrow," I forget. How can mere skeleton men compete with that?

Four Lovers (2010)

FOUR LOVERS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Antony Cordier
    Èlodie Bouchez, Marina Fois, 
    Nicolas Duvauchelle, Roschdy Zem
Two French couples decide to swap partners, in about the time it takes to read this sentence. Complications occur, but what the heck, they're beautiful, they're French, and eventually they all end up covered in flour, rolling around together on the kitchen floor. Plus, one of the women is played by Èlodie Bouchez. That's good enough for me.

Desert Island Classics / Take 2

A comedy tonight.

"The General" 
  (1927/Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman)
  Buster Keaton, a railroad engine and the Civil War.
"Horse Feathers" 
  (1932/Norman Z. McLeod)
  The Marx Brothers go to college.
"Modern Times" 
  (1936/Charles Chaplin)
  Chaplin's funniest film.
"Way Out West" 
  (1937/James W. Horne)
  Laurel and Hardy out West.
"The Bank Dick" 
  (1940/Eddie Cline)
  W.C. Fields and a script by Mahatma Kane Jeeves.
"Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" 
  (1948/Charles Barton)
  They meet Dracula and the Wolf Man, too.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" 
  (1975/Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones)
  The moose choreography is amazing.
"Animal House" 
  (1978/John Landis)
  "Grab a brew. Don't cost nothin'."
"Airplane!" 
  (1980/Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker)
  "Guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue." 
"Stripes" 
  (1981/Ivan Reitman)
  Bill Murray joins the Army.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Wood
    Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan,
    Elsa Janssen, Ludwig Stössel, Dan Duryea,
    Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey, Ernie Adams
Lou Gehrig's name might be more famous now for the disease he died from than for anything he did playing baseball, but what he did playing baseball was pretty amazing. As the first baseman for the great Yankees teams of the '20s and '30s, Gehrig played an incredible 2,130 consecutive games, till the physical toll from an incurable illness forced him to leave the field. Gary Cooper was about 40 when he made this, and he looks a little old to be playing Gehrig as an undergraduate at Columbia. Beyond that, it's hard to imagine any other actor playing the part, or being better cast. As sports heroes go, Gehrig was the real deal, and Cooper's affecting performance is iconic. By the end, when he delivers Gehrig's famous echoing farewell at Yankee Stadium, there's not a dry eye in the house.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Colin Trevorrow
    Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Karan Soni, 
    Jake Johnson, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Lauren Carlos
A lot of low-budget, independent movies, you end up admiring the ambition more than the result. This one's an exception, a sweet little oddball romance about a guy who claims he can time travel and a girl who may or may not be crazy enough to join him. There's a distracting subplot - a couple of them - but as long as the picture stays with its two leads, it's a low-key gem. Plaza has a way of dragging out her vowels that could drive you nuts, if her performance wasn't so winning. She has a real gift for deadpan comedy, and her smile, when she does smile, lights up the screen. Duplass plays it even straighter than that, as a geek who grew older but never grew up, and whose eccentric behavior could be a mark of genius, or a symptom of madness, or both. The ending, under the circumstances, is perfect. You'd like to see more of these two characters, but it's hard not to feel good about where they end up. And wherever they're off to from here on out, you wish them well.

Peg o' the Mounted (1924)

PEG O' THE MOUNTED  (1924)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Alfred J. Goulding
    Baby Peggy, Bert Sterling, Jack Earle
Baby Peggy Montgomery was a precocious, moon-faced kid who for a few years in the 1920s was a rival to Jackie Coogan as the most popular child star in Hollywood. In this two-reeler, she puts on a miniature Mountie uniform to take on a gang of moonshiners. The storytelling is thin, the slapstick is primitive, and Baby Peggy's acting consists mainly of making faces, mugging for the camera. Not exactly cinema for the ages, in other words, but a chance to watch and wonder what it was that made Baby Peggy such an unlikely attraction. She wasn't that good, really. She wasn't even all that cute.

Django Unchained (2012)

DJANGO UNCHAINED  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Quentin Tarantino
    Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio,
    Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, James Remar,
    Dennis Christopher, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, 
    Bruce Dern, Franco Nero, Russ Tamblyn, Don Stroud, 
    Alto Essandoh, James Russo, Tom Wopat, 
    Cooper Huckabee, Zoe Bell, Amber Tamblyn, 
    Jonah Hill, Michael Parks, Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino's epic spaghetti western (more like a spaghetti southern) starring Jamie Foxx as a freed slave named Django, who joins forces with a German dentist (Christoph Waltz) to go into the bounty hunting business. Traveling as far west as Wyoming, he and the doc go about trading the corpses of bad guys for dollars, till they can buy back Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio. This movie does for American slavery about what "Inglourious Basterds" did for World War Two, and if the juxtaposition of hip dialogue and revolting brutality makes you queasy, maybe it's supposed to. Or maybe not. I'm not sure about that, and I'm not sure Tarantino cares. He's still the video store clerk who got to be the king of the movies, but where his sensibility comes down remains an open question. So you get to see a black slave being ripped apart by dogs and Jamie looking cool in an unlikely pair of shades and guys getting shot spewing geysers of blood and Leo laying on the corn-pone villainy with sadistic bravado and a cracker accent: a revenge fantasy in which atrocity gets recast and marketed as escapist entertainment. The word "nigger" gets used a lot, too. As somebody said in another movie once, "Are you not entertained?" Maybe. Maybe not. I'm still not sure.

Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Brian Yuzna
    Kent McCord, J. Trevor Edmond, Mindy Clarke,
    James T. Callahan, Sarah Douglas, Basil Wallace
This starts out with a couple of teenagers sneaking into a military research facility where Lt. Col. Kent McCord is running experiments aimed at turning zombies into bioweapons - unkillable soldiers who can be dispatched over and over to fight future wars. It's about what you'd expect from a sequel to a sequel to a sequel, and then it gets interesting. First you meet the "Riverman" (Basil Wallace), a black guy from New Orleans who's somehow ended up living in an old pump room deep in the bowels of the Los Angeles sewer system. He's a genuinely interesting character, and you don't come across many of those in movies like this. Then one of the teenagers, the girl played by Mindy Clarke, starts to engage in progressively more extreme acts of self-mutilation to fight off the infection that's turning her into one of the undead. You don't see that in a lot of zombie movies, either. Then, somewhere in there, it kind of sneakily becomes this sweet little zombie love story, where the teenaged guy won't let go of his zombie girlfriend no matter what, while she keeps piercing herself in every place imaginable to counter her craving for brains. So I don't know. It still might not be a very good movie, but it's not a total throwaway, either. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel, you take what you can get.

Skyfall (2012)

SKYFALL  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Mendes
    Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, 
    Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Berenice Marlohe, 
    Ben Whishaw, Albert Finney, Ola Rapace
Daniel Craig's third outing as James Bond has 007 on the trail of a rogue agent named Silva, played by Javier Bardem with weird-looking hair, worse-looking teeth, an insolent manner and a deadly personal grudge against Bond's boss M (Judi Dench). This more or less completes the origin story that began with "Casino Royale" in 2006, and provides a graceful valediction for one of the franchise's key players. It opens with a slam-bang chase, and concludes with a tense confrontation at Bond's ancestral home, a cold, remote outpost on the Scottish moor. In between, it's a Bond movie, and a good one, stylish, outlandish and irresistible, complete with a significant cameo by one of Bond's favorite vintage automobiles. (At the screening I attended, the audience broke into spontaneous applause only once, and that was for the car.) The end titles promise, as always, that Bond will return, and with several of his MI6 colleagues settling in for what could be an extended run, the future looks promising indeed. 

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

SUNSET BLVD.  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Billy Wilder
    Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim,
    Nancy Olson, Jack Webb, Cecil B. DeMille,
    Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner
Tinseltown noir, with William Holden as a down-and-out screenwriter who stumbles into the decaying mansion of a silent-era star and ends up moving in to ghostwrite her comeback vehicle, a pathetically misguided remake of "Salome", to be directed (she says) by Cecil B. DeMille. You get a clue about where this is going in the opening shot, the movie's title painted on the street edge of a sidewalk. It's the first thing you see: a gutter. What follows is as morbid and comical as movies about movies get, a funny, despairing look at the dark side of Hollywood, narrated by a corpse. A number of silent stars turn up in cameos, playing themselves, along with von Stroheim as a butler and DeMille as DeMille on the set of "Samson and Delilah", which he was shooting at the time. But the movie belongs to Gloria Swanson, who turns in one of the screen's great unhinged performances: a grotesque caricature, and considering the vanity of most movie stars, an incredibly gutsy piece of work. Her final descent toward the camera (and into madness) is justifiably famous, but if the only thing you know Gloria Swanson from is "Sunset Blvd.", you owe it to yourself to check out some of her silent films. In the decade before movies started to talk, she really was one of Hollywood's greatest stars, and you get a brief glimpse of that here. She was something.

I Capture the Castle (2003)

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tim Fywell
    Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas,
    Bill Nighy, Tara Fitzgerald, Sinead Cusack
An eccentric, impoverished family moves into a rented castle on an English country estate. Romantic entanglements follow. There's a touch of "Atonement" in the way class and writing play into the story, and in the casting of Romola Garai as the teenaged girl through whose diary entries the tale unfolds. It's romanticized and melodramatic, but that's to be expected, considering the alleged source material, and most of the time, the actors pull it off. Tara Fitzgerald provides eye-catching support as an artistic free spirit who likes to go naked in the rain.