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)