THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Z. Leonard
William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer,
Frank Morgan, Virginia Bruce, Reginald Owen,
Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger, Nat Pendleton
An elaborate musical biography of the early 20th century's master showman, with William Powell in the title role, and a lot of vintage variety acts. Highlights include routines by Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, and a couple of stupendous production numbers. (The narrative goes on vacation for a reel at a time, when the girls and costumes take over.) Among the curiosities: an actor who looks exactly like Will Rogers playing Will Rogers, rope tricks and all, and a song-and-dance routine to "If You Knew Susie" with an Eddie Cantor impersonator in blackface. The picture and Luise Rainer both won Academy Awards.
Luise Rainer
(1910-2014)
HORS SATAN (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Bruno Dumont
David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre,
Christophe Bon, Aurore Broutin
There's a guy who lives in a makeshift camp down by the beach. He looks like a vagrant. The area around there is rural: corn fields, patches of tall marsh grass and pastures where cattle graze. The vagrant lives off handouts from the nearby houses, and there's this one girl especially, a vaguely punk-looking young woman with pale skin and spiky black hair, who gives him sandwiches and apparently washes his clothes. The two of them take long walks together, and sometimes when she's in a tough spot, he helps her out. He seems to have magical powers, but whether he's an angel, or a demon, or something else, is hard to say. The woman offers herself to him, but he says no. He doesn't tell her why. He just tells her that's how it is. There's no music except for the sounds of birds. There are a lot of long takes. A lot of tight closeups and pensive stares. To make something like this work, you need actors with charisma, and the movie has two of them: David Dewaele who plays the vagrant and Alexandra Lemâtre who plays the girl. You don't really know what's going on in it, or where it's going to go, or even what it's about. That's how it hooks you. You keep watching because you want to find out.
SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK (1921) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Max Linder
Max Linder, Alta Allen, Ralph McCullough
Max Linder was a French silent comic who achieved worldwide fame before Charlie Chaplin ever stepped in front of a camera. He was injured while serving in the First World War (some accounts say he was exposed to poison gas) and made fewer films after that, some in Europe and some in the United States. In this Hollywood production, a broken mirror triggers a series of sight gags, some of them real funny. The best ones involve the mirror, an impromptu dance, a glue pot and a lion. Unfortunately, depression and the war had caused Linder's health to deteriorate, and his career faded as Chaplin's peaked. He and his wife committed suicide together in 1925.
IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Hans Petter Moland
Stellan Skarsgård, Bruno Ganz, Pål Sverre Hagen,
Birgitte Hjort Sorenson, Jakob Oftebro
A stone-cold comedy from Norway about an award-winning snowplow driver who decides to get even when somebody murders his son. "Fargo" meets "Lillehammer" somewhere in here. Who knew snowplow drivers could be so lethal?
COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA (1952) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Daniel Mann
Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster,
Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel
Shirley Booth recreates her Broadway role as a dowdy, middle-aged housewife trying to cope with loneliness, the passage of time and her husband's battle with alcohol. Lancaster plays the husband, a chiropractor who's just completed his first year in A.A. Booth won an Oscar for her performance, and with her nonstop chatter and whiny voice, you can see why Burt's character might reach for the bottle now and then. You also get a real sense of her underlying good nature, and her desperation. Lancaster's miscast - he looks too young and too fit - but his inclination to take on something like this sent a signal early on that he was an actor and a movie star who didn't mind taking dramatic risks. The film doesn't open the play up much. Most of it's set in just two rooms - a living room and a kitchen. The result is a suffocating closeness, like you're stuck in this intimate prison shared by two unhappy people, fighting to salvage what remains of their lives in the twilight of dreams long gone.
AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ
D: Nancy Buirski (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
A documentary on the long life and tragically brief career of Tanaquil Le Clercq, a tall, elegant ballerina whose artistry and breathtaking beauty made her the muse to both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. A pretty prima donna with a domineering mother, driven to meet impossible demands, sometimes sweet, sometimes cranky, sometimes an emotional wreck: Le Clercq could be the real-life model for "Black Swan". She was just reaching her peak in the mid-1950s, when polio struck her down at 26. She lived to be 71, confined to an iron lung and then a wheelchair. She never danced again. The movie's effective as an appreciation of Le Clercq's significance in the world of classical dance, but as a record of her life, it feels sketchy and unfocused. The archival footage of her dancing is in fuzzy black and white. (In a televised piece choreographed specifically for the March of Dimes, she does a pas de deux with Balanchine himself playing Polio.) That's where the film strikes a chord, and that's where it probably should. The irony is eerie and inescapable. You feel like you're watching a ghost.
PHINEAS AND FERB:
A VERY PERRY CHRISTMAS (2009/2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Zac Moncrief, Jay Lender, Robert F. Hughes
Chances are, unless you've got kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews of a certain age, you've never even heard of Phineas and Ferb. If that's the case, here's the scoop. "Phineas and Ferb" is a Disney cartoon series about two stepbrothers who live in a town called Danville and have lots of wildly imagined adventures over a summer vacation that goes on forever, or 104 days, whichever comes last. Phineas is the idea man. (His signature line: "I know what we're gonna do today!") Ferb is the engineer, the quiet kid who can build anything and brings those fabulous ideas to life. Their endearingly vain and shallow sister Candace is a few years older and determined to bust them, which she never quite manages to do. Perry, their pet platypus, transforms into the daring and intrepid "Agent P" whenever somebody asks, "Where's Perry?", which somebody always does. Agent P's archenemy is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz (of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.), who in every episode has just invented some new high-tech beam apparatus designed to bring darkness and doom to the entire Tri-State Area. Are you still with me? It doesn't matter. The show's full of jokes and puns and cultural references that will amuse the grownups while flying right by their children, who will still find something to relate to in the show's animated characters. The closest thing I could compare it to is "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle", if you're old enough to remember that. The highlight of this DVD compilation is a 33-minute story called "Christmas Vacation!", in which the kids and Perry try to stop Dr. Doofenshmirtz from tricking Santa into skipping his annual Christmas drop over Danville. It's not as tightly plotted as some of the shorter episodes, but all the characters are in play, doing what they do best. Four of the shorter (12-minute) episodes are included on the DVD. If the current vapid state of kids' entertainment is driving you nuts, give it a shot. You might like it. Your kids might like it. It might make you all want to watch more "Phineas and Ferb".
BYZANTIUM (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Neil Jordan
Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton, Sam Riley,
Jonny Lee Miller, Kate Ashfield, Daniel Mays
A mother-and-daughter vampire team travels from town to town, feeding when the opportunity presents itself and getting by on the money mom makes as a hooker and exotic dancer - a line of work not many 200-year-old women who aren't vampires would be able to sustain. A convoluted storyline and some thinly sketched characters undercut the suspense, and it's never as scary as you'd like a vampire movie to be, but Jordan gets some nice atmospherics from a lighting scheme that looks dim even on a sunny day, and he sure doesn't skimp on the blood - there are rivers of it. Ronan's understated performance as the younger vampire almost makes you believe she could be a creature who's been tapping veins since the early 19th century. And if she should show up at your door when you're old and infirm and ready to move on to the other side, you could do yourself a favor. You could let her in.
The players who show up for work and get the job done year in and year out don't always take home the big prizes. None of the following actors (so far) has ever won an Academy Award:
Bill Murray
Nick Nolte
Willem Dafoe
Harvey Keitel
Edward Norton
Jeff Daniels
Ed Harris
Steve Buscemi
Woody Harrelson
Donald Sutherland
CITIZEN KANE (1941) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Orson Welles
Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane,
Dorothy Comingore, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins,
Agnes Moorhead, George Coulouris, Paul Stewart
Rosebud.
THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE (1996) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael Epstein, Thomas Lennon
An Oscar-nominated documentary about the lives of Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst, and how they converged and collided in Welles' 1941 masterpiece. An ironic study in life and illusion, filled with illuminating clips from "Kane", and commentary by Robert Wise, Jimmy Breslin, Peter Bogdanovich and others. Hearst the newspaper publisher and Welles the filmmaker were both larger-than-life characters with immense appetites and abilities, and in a clash of colossal egos, both miscalculated. Welles thought he could take on Hearst and get away with it. He couldn't. Hearst thought he could control the public's access to Welles' picture, if he had to, by destroying it. He couldn't do that, either. The only winner in the end was "Citizen Kane", which survives both men, and reflects both of their lives in ways neither of them could have anticipated or intended.
HER (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Spike Jonze
Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams,
Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Matt Letscher, Chris Pratt
Shades of "Ruby Sparks" in a romantic comedy about the relationship between a guy and his operating system. The setting's unreal: an affluent, immaculate and apparently crime-free future Los Angeles. The guy's played by Joaquin Phoenix, and like Paul Dano's character in "Ruby Sparks", he's a writer, and things start to get tricky when the supposedly artificial entity he's involved with decides to explore her own rapidly expanding potential. The premise sounds far-fetched, but wait. The next time you're on the train or the bus, check out how many people are riding with their heads down, lost in a world where nothing exists beyond their thumbs and their digital toys. Who knows what they're up to? Maybe it's this. Also, the voice of the operating system is Scarlett Johansson. Maybe a guy could fall for something like that.
OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS (1928) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Harry Beaumont
Joan Crawford, Johnny Mack Brown,
Dorothy Sebastian, Anita Page, Nils Aster,
Kathlyn Williams, Edward Nugent
In her first significant lead role, Joan Crawford plays a good-time girl who loses the man of her dreams to a gold digger who's no good at all. There's something distinctly modern about Crawford's acting that stands out in the context of a silent film. Her character's a hedonist with a heart, a combination of free-spirited sauciness and vulnerability that Crawford knew instinctively how to express, often with no more than a look. The shadowy cinematography and posh art-deco sets are eye-catching, too, but the movie belongs to the eye-catching Crawford. You can see why it made her a star.
MACHETE KILLS (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Robert Rodriguez
Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez,
Alexa Vega, Demian Bechir, Amber Heard,
Charlie Sheen, Antonio Banderas, Sofia Vergara,
Lady Gaga, Vanessa Hudgens, Cuba Gooding Jr.
Machete's back, and Machete still don't text. Well, maybe, just a little. What Machete does mostly is glower a lot while separating people from their heads in various creative ways. (Helicopter blades are useful for this purpose. You'll see.) Danny Trejo again plays the lethal, implacable Machete. The nutball villain is Mel Gibson, looking more energized than he has in years. Michelle Rodriguez drops in again as Luz (aka "She"), a cyclopic killing machine who could just about match Machete for gut-spilling, blood-spewing expertise. The storytelling's sloppy. The violence is absurd. It's pure exploitation - mean, funny, gory and inexcusable - just what a great drive-in movie should be. It ends with a promise that Machete will kill again (in space!). Fair enough, and you can count me in. But after that, how about a vehicle showcasing Michelle Rodriguez? She's hot, she's tough, she's apparently unkillable, and she makes those form-fitting commando outfits she wears look real good. Think about it. Not even Machete can compete with that.
SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT
D: Trey Parker (1999) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
The South Park kids sneak into an R-rated Canadian art film called "Asses of Fire" and emerge three hours later with a collective case of Tourette's syndrome. Their mothers respond by mobilizing the local PTA and persuading President Clinton to declare war on Canada. Kenny tries to light a fart on fire, suffers third-degree burns, dies on the operating table when the doctor accidentally replaces his heart with a baked potato, and goes to hell, where Satan is having a homosexual affair with Saddam Hussein. The kids organize a resistance group and stage a commando raid on a USO rally where a double execution is scheduled to take place. Let's see, what else? Bill Gates, Conan O'Brien and the Baldwin brothers all get killed. Brooke Shields makes a ditzy remark on a TV talk show and gets slapped upside the head. Brian Dennehy does an accidental cameo when he shows up for a musical number showcasing Brian Boitano. Winona Ryder entertains the USO audience by, um, doing something with ping pong balls. Nothing's sacred and no sacred cow is safe. Censorship gets slammed. The movie rating system gets blasted. Hypocrisy gets reamed. The picture even makes fun of its own animation. Imagine "Peanuts" with a script by Lenny Bruce. Only bigger. And longer. And uncut.
AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: David O. Russell
Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper,
Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Robert De Niro
Cons conning cons in an ever-expanding con that gets way too big for any of them to handle. Featured attractions include Christian Bale's gut, Bradley Cooper's perm, Jeremy Renner's pompadour, Amy Adams' boobs (or at least some eye-catching cleavage) and Jennifer Lawrence's pout. The best thing you can say about these characters is that they deserve each other, but who's holding the final card up which sleeve won't be revealed till the last double-cross has been executed. Bale's comb-over is hideous, but as misguided fashion statements go, it's probably no worse than his leisure suits.
THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Guillerman, Irwin Allen
Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden,
Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain,
Jennifer Jones, Susan Blakely, O.J. Simpson,
Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, Susan Flannery
When the world's tallest building catches fire on the night of its dedication bash, it's up to a rugged, blue-eyed fire chief and a handsome, blue-eyed architect to save a roomful of well-heeled partygoers from turning into human toast. An irresistibly clunky Irwin Allen disaster epic in which flames shoot out of a model skyscraper while the leads act heroic and various supporting players either get torched or go splat on the sidewalk. Jennifer Jones plays one of the characters who doesn't make it, but at least the rescue workers manage to save her cat. It's that kind of movie.
THE GREAT BEAUTY (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Paolo Sorrentino
Toni Servillo, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Verdone,
Pamela Villoresi, Aldo Ralli, Giusi Merli,
Anita Kravos, Anna Della Rossa, Galatea Ranzi
Rome, through the eyes of a jaded socialite, a 65-year-old writer who published a widely acclaimed novel once, but has spent the last 40 years working for magazines and living the good life in the Eternal City. Jep (Toni Servillo) is mostly at peace with the choices he's made. He likes the attention he gets, and the tailored clothes, and the parties, and the beautiful people. And yet he looks bored, and he's reached a point where the passage of time can't be ignored. There's a lot of Fellini in the scattered narrative, and in the way Sorrentino skewers the decadent snobs Jep associates with. The camera follows along, gliding through the streets, under bridges, into noisy public squares and quiet spaces, pausing whenever something catches Sorrentino's eye (or Jep's), an insider's personalized tour of the city. In the end there's a sense of loss, if not regret, and a suggestion that maybe Jep will go to work on a second novel, after all. Or maybe not. The seductive powers of Rome are hard to resist, and Jep has spent the good part of a lifetime not resisting them. Old habits aren't easy to break. And there's bound to be another party tomorrow night.
HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Erle C. Kenton
Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine,
J. Carroll Naish, Elena Verdugo, Lionel Atwill,
Glenn Strange, George Zucco, Sig Rumann
An entertaining late entry in the classic Universal horror cycle, with Karloff as a vengeful scientist, Carradine as Count Dracula, Chaney as the Wolf Man, Strange as the Frankenstein Monster and Naish as the hunchback who does Karloff's bidding. Dracula's disposed of before the Wolf Man and the Monster even appear, and poor Larry Talbot (Chaney) gets impatient waiting for Boris to take time off from the Monster to cure his lycanthropy and settles for a silver bullet from a gypsy dancing girl played by Elena Verdugo. Then the hunchback gets fed up, because he loves the gypsy girl, too, and wants his brain transplanted into Talbot's body, but Boris is in no hurry to do that, either. So the hunchback tries to strangle Boris, but the Monster intervenes and throws the hunchback out the window, and then the Monster drags Boris off into the woods where they're chased by the usual mob of angry villagers armed with torches and pitchforks, and they're heading straight for the quicksand, but you know what? I bet the writers of the next sequel will figure out a way to bring them all back. That'd be my guess, anyway.
MEGAMIND (2010) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Tom McGrath
A villain faces an identity crisis when the hero he's battled all his life apparently dies, and there's nothing left to stand in the way of his evil. An animated feature for fanboys, spoofing the roles that heroes and villains in comic books typically play. Which is fine, I guess, if you're part of the target audience. There's a very funny send-up of Marlon Brando's father figure in "Superman", and the Minion, a fish with the body of a gorilla robot, is an unusual sight, to say the least.
MICKEY (1918) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: F. Richard Jones, James Young
Mabel Normand, George Nichols, Lew Cody,
Wheeler Oakman, Minta Durfee, Laura La Varnie
This is like a Mary Pickford movie with Mabel Normand in the kind of role Little Mary would play. It's a Cinderella story about a country girl who moves to the city, where some greedy relatives put her to work cleaning their house while trying to swindle her out of her inheritance. There's a little slapstick, a little romance, a lot of melodrama and a big horse race toward the end, with Mabel up on one of the steeds. Normand hasn't got Pickford's golden-haired beauty, but she's a less cloying actress, and with a background in comedy, she has the appearance of not taking herself too seriously. That all helps. Minta Durfee, who plays the youngest of the greedy relatives, was married to Fatty Arbuckle.
FROZEN RIVER (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Courtney Hunt
Melissa Leo, Misty Upham,
Charlie McDermott, Michael O'Keefe
Melissa Leo plays Ray Eddy, a middle-aged woman who looks a lot older, living with her two sons in a rundown trailer in a depressed corner of upstate New York. Her husband, a gambling addict, has run off to who knows where, taking all their money. It's not that she's barely making it on her part-time job at the local store. She's not making it. There's not enough for Christmas, not enough for food, not enough to keep the TV from being repossessed, and certainly not enough to make the down payment on that shiny new double-wide she's set her dreams on. So she grudgingly teams up with a sullen young Mohawk woman, whose circumstances aren't any better, on a smuggling run across the frozen St. Lawrence, sneaking illegals over the border from Canada. It's a wrenching, unblinking and emphatically unsentimental look at what life's like at the bottom of the economy - the world of the desperate, tenacious and too often invisible working poor. Leo, whose performance got her an Oscar nomination, gets to the soul of a woman who hasn't known a happy day in her life. It's a downer, for sure, yet it ends with a glimmer of hope, or maybe just a suggestion that where hope is mostly an illusion, a simple, fleeting moment of joy is enough to be worth hanging on for, and quite possibly the best that can be expected.
Misty Upham
(1982-2014)
William Holden as Pike Bishop
in "The Wild Bunch" (1969)
In 1939, William Holden was Hollywood's original "Golden Boy", but by the time he played Pike Bishop in "The Wild Bunch" 30 years later, he was starting to look used up. In this scene, Pike and his gang of outlaws are riding down into Mexico after a famously bloody shootout they just barely survived. They're on top of a sand dune when their horses lose their footing and men and animals go tumbling down the hill. They get up cursing, dust themselves off and get ready to ride on, but when Pike goes to get on his horse, the stirrup breaks and he goes sprawling back down on the ground. He struggles to get to his feet, gritting his teeth, in obvious pain, while the others laugh or look on, waiting. If Pike can't ride, he can't lead the gang, and everybody knows it. Without a word, Holden picks up the broken stirrup and stuffs it in a saddlebag, and then, in an act of sheer will, swings a leg up over the saddle and mounts his horse. Then he turns and rides away, straight-backed but plainly in agony, one leg dangling where the stirrup used to be. There's something heroic, majestic even, about the way he does that. It's not just a man riding away on a horse. It's Pike Bishop (and William Holden) fighting off the toll of time at least a little longer. The gang remains intact. Pike is still the outlaw leader.
LONE STAR (1996) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: John Sayles
Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña, Kris Kristofferson,
Joe Morton, Ron Canada, Matthew McConaughey,
Clifton James, Miriam Colon, Frances McDormand
When a skeleton turns up in a shallow desert grave, together with a rusty sheriff's badge, a Masonic ring and the spent cartridge from a Colt 45, a bordertown lawman starts to investigate, uncovering four decades worth of buried secrets. John Sayles does "Touch of Evil" by way of "Rashomon" with a brilliantly conceived murder mystery that both defines and crosses the borders of geography, community and time. By following the story and its various threads where they logically lead, Sayles examines the town's complex multicultural relationships, sometimes coming close to soap opera, but always pulling back from the edge to keep it all on track. It's an inspired piece of storytelling, arguably Sayles' masterpiece, and you'll never appreciate how nasty Kris Kristofferson can be till you see him in this.
Elizabeth Peña
(1959-2014)
IN THE HOUSE (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Francois Ozon
Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas,
Emmanuelle Seigner, Denis Ménochet, Bastien Ughetto
The French seem to like these movies about writers where what the writer writes and what the movie does with it puts a blurry spin on the distinction between fiction and reality. This one starts out with a high-school teacher who has his students write an essay about how they spent their weekend. Most are negligible and some are just plain bad, but one catches the teacher's eye: a first-person account by a boy named Claude about how he managed to slip into a classmate's house. The essay ends with the words "to be continued." The kid clearly has talent, and the teacher finds the essay both intriguing and a little disturbing. So the kid writes more installments (always "to be continued") with the teacher's advice and encouragement. The teacher shares them with his wife. And the teacher, the wife, the classmate and the classmate's family all get caught up in the story, both on the page and away from it. There's a significant ethical lapse on the part of the teacher that should be fatal to the film, but by the time it occurs, the movie has started slipping into who-knows-what's-real territory anyway. It's either creepy in a funny kind of way, or funny in a creepy kind of way, depending on your point of view. And you end up wanting to know, almost as much as the teacher does, how it's going to play out, in the story the kid's writing, or the story that's playing out around the story the kid's writing, or, you know, whatever.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Roger Corman
Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher,
David Weston, Patrick Magee, Nigel Green
Price plays Prince Prospero, a devil-worshipping sadist who devises a series of cruel games to amuse and torment his guests, while outside his castle, a plague called the Red Death rages all around. Probably the best of the Price/Corman/Poe collaborations, beautifully designed and shot. It's the closest thing to an art film Corman ever did, part Bergman and part Fellini, made in England to take advantage of the tax laws there and sets left over from "Becket". The cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg.
MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE'S MOST WANTED
(2012) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, Conrad Vernon
Cute animated animals join a circus in Monte Carlo, hoping to get back to America and their home, the Central Park Zoo. Flashy colors, catchy tunes and some lively voice work, including Frances McDormand as the villain, a murderous animal control officer whose mascara runs wild when she sings Edith Piaf. Kids love these movies (even if they don't know Edith Piaf), and that's not so bad. There are much worse things out there they could be looking at, I'm sure.
THE RING (1927) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alfred Hitchcock
Carl Brisson, Ian Hunter, Lillian Hall-Davis,
Forrester Harvey, Harry Terry, Gordon Harker
One of Hitchcock's best silents, a boxing drama about two fighters, rivals in the ring and in love with the same girl. The director was still in his 20s when he made this, still figuring out what a camera could do. He's experimenting like crazy, and the results are fascinating to watch. Carl Brisson, playing a character named "One-Round" Jack Sander, had been a boxer in real life, and went on to a musical career. One of the few Hitchcock movies in which the director himself does not appear.
RED 2 (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Dean Parisot
Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren,
Mary Louise Parker, Anthony Hopkins,
Catherine Zeta-Jones, David Thewlis
The Return of the Killer Elite, with the same old band of assassins getting together to either murder each other or save the world, whichever comes first. The first "Red" movie was an enjoyable throwaway, and this is more of the same, an action comedy in which the number of evildoers killed is exceeded only by the number of bullets required to kill them. The cast might be on cruise control, but these folks can get away with that. Malkovich has an especially good time as the gang's loosest loose cannon, and there isn't a stuffed pig in sight.
ONE WAY PASSAGE (1932) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Tay Garnett
William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline McMahon,
Frank McHugh, Warren Hymer, Herbert Mundin
Two people meet and fall for each other on an ocean liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The catch: She's dying and he's on his way to San Quentin to be hanged. A sparkling comic romance with an understandably dark edge, nicely played by the two leads. Frank McHugh overdoes it as a garrulous pickpocket, but Aline McMahon is so good playing a grifter posing as a countess, you wish she had her own movie to grift around in.
A.K.A. DOC POMUS (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: William Hechtner, Peter Miller
An engaging, heartfelt documentary about how Jerome Felder, a fat, crippled Jewish kid from Brooklyn, changed his name to Doc Pomus, crashed the New York music scene as a blues singer, and went on to write hundreds of songs, turning out hits for everybody from Elvis to Ray Charles to Andy Williams to Mink DeVille. This guy might be the greatest songwriter you've never heard of, though the odds that you've never heard any of his music are remote. To other musicians and songwriters, he's a legend. Lou Reed, B.B. King, Dr. John, Dion, Shawn Colvin and Marshall Chapman are among those who turn out to pay tribute here, and their affection and respect for the man is obvious. When Bob Dylan comes around and asks you to write some lyrics for his songs, that's saying something, and not many songwriters can make that claim. One who could was Doc Pomus.
ALICE IN ACIDLAND (1969) 1/2 ¢
D: John Donne
Sheri Jackson, Julia Blackburn,
Janice Kelly, Roger Gentry
Maybe I was wrong to hope for anything at all from a picture called "Alice In Acidland" released in 1969, but, jeez, does this movie suck. It's a grindhouse exposé about a nice girl who falls in with the wrong crowd and starts dropping acid and smoking pot. Naturally, bad things happen after that. There's no spoken dialogue, just a lot of doom-heavy narration dubbed over some awkwardly staged softcore scenes. Most of it's in black and white and looks like something from well before the era of love beads and bell-bottoms. The color sequence that kicks in toward the end looks like the work of another filmmaker. Not a better filmmaker necessarily, just a different one.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Tim Burton
Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter,
Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Tim Pigott-Smith
Tim Burton's eye-filling screen version of the Lewis Carroll story about a girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe where she grows real big and grows real small and meets all kinds of strange, wonderful, terrifying creatures. Burton's visual playfulness is a good match for Carroll's verbal whimsy, the combination of live action and CGI animation looks seamless, and the cast is having a real good time. (Personal favorites: Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat and Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar.) Johnny Depp's the Mad Hatter. Anne Hathaway's the White Queen. Helena Bonham Carter plays the Red Queen, who wants to take off everybody's head. (And wait till you see her head.) Beware the Jabberwock, keep the Vorpal blade at hand, and take a tumble down this rabbit hole yourself.
Way out West.
"Tumbleweeds"
(1925/King Baggot)
William S. Hart and the Great Oklahoma Land Rush.
"The Ox-Bow Incident"
(1943/William Wellman)
Mob justice. Noir finds a home on the range.
"High Noon"
(1952/Fred Zinnemann)
Coop faces the bad guys alone.
"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"
(1962/John Ford)
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
"For a Few Dollars More"
(1965/Sergio Leone)
Leone and Morricone. Eastwood and Van Cleef.
Spaghetti at its best.
"The Professionals"
(1966/Richard Brooks)
Gringos in Mexico. Burt rigs the pass.
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"
(1969/George Roy Hill)
Who are those guys?
"The Ballad of Cable Hogue"
(1970/Sam Peckinpah)
Jason Robards builds an oasis.
Stella Stevens helps him enjoy it.
"The Shootist"
(1976/Don Siegel)
The Duke at the end of the trail.
"Silverado"
(1985/Lawrence Kasdan)
The good guys against the bad guys, one more time.
MCLINTOCK! (1963) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Andrew V. McLaglen
John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Patrick Wayne,
Stefanie Powers, Yvonne De Carlo, Chill Wills,
Bruce Cabot, Jerry Van Dyke, Strother Martin
A boisterous, broadly played western with the Duke as a cattle baron who dispenses heavy-handed doses of rugged individualism when he's not otherwise occupied drinking heavily, arguing with Maureen O'Hara and beating people up. It was movies like this that made John Wayne an icon in conservative America, idealizing homespun frontier values and patronizing anybody who's not white, male and rich. It'd be a mistake to take it too seriously, though, when the action highlight is a slapstick fistfight that leaves the entire cast slipping, falling and stumbling around in a pit of mud. It ain't subtle, but it's fun.
Andrew V. McLaglen
(1920-2014)
RENOIR (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Gilles Bourdos
Michel Bouquet, Christa Theret, Vincent Rottiers,
Thomas Doret, Romane Bohringer, Michèle Gleizer
The thing you notice about this movie, from the beginning, is the light. It's perfect. Maybe this light only exists in the South of France. I don't know. It's 1915. The painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir is still at work, old and arthritic, attended to by a household of doting women, a brush strapped to his painfully crippled right hand. The painter's son Jean, the future filmmaker, is home on leave from the war, recovering from a leg wound. Into their world, riding a bicycle and wrapped in russet colors that match her hair, comes Andrée Heuschling, the temperamental, free-spirited beauty who would become a muse to both men, first as the painter's model, and later as the filmmaker's wife and cinematic collaborator. As men and artists, Auguste and Jean are at opposite ends of their lives. Auguste works quickly, driven to finish his work, more concerned with color than with line. His obsession is with skin, and one look at Andrée's undraped form makes it clear that the old man knows what he's talking about. Jean, meanwhile, doesn't even know what he wants to do yet. He's years away from making his first movie, but already he's collecting reels of film and screening them on what he calls a "contraption," a World-War-One-era projector. His moves toward Andrée, like his moves toward his art, are tentative. As a muse, Andrée seems, not dull, really, but a little superficial. She's pouty and hedonistic, flirting and backing away, but beyond her obvious physical charms, it's hard to see why Jean would put up with her, which he would, for the next 15 years. But then there's the way the sun streams in through a window, and the wind plays over the water and through the trees. A bit of white fabric slipping down off a model's shoulder. The brushstrokes on canvas. The light and the color. The contours and texture of skin. To the eye of an artist, especially an old one racing the clock, maybe that's everything. Maybe it's enough.
PHANTOM (1922) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: F.W. Murnau
Alfred Abel, Lil Dagover, Lya de Putti,
Frieda Richard, Aud Egede-Nissen, Grete Berger
The downfall of an honest man. A German silent melodrama about a young would-be poet whose life hits the skids just when he thinks he's about to be published. As it happens, he's not going to be published, but it takes him a while to figure that out, and in the meantime all kinds of bad choices are made and all kinds of bad things happen. Alfred Abel looks way too old to be playing the young dreamer - he could pass for William S. Hart's brother - and his character seems incapable of finding any joy in life, whether he's home with his books and his long-suffering mother, or out on the town cavorting with sinners. (Sinning turns out to be something he's not particularly good at.) So it's not too convincing, but the camerawork looks real good, especially the restored version with its vibrant color tints. Released the came year as Murnau's vampire classic "Nosferatu".
PHANTOM (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Todd Robinson
Ed Harris, David Duchovny, William Fichtner,
Lance Henriksen, Johnathon Schaech, Jason Beghe
A tense, old-style Cold War thriller starring Ed Harris as the captain of a Soviet sub and David Duchovny as a rogue KGB op who's out to start World War Three. Writer/ director Robinson doesn't waste much time cutting to the suspense, and you can check off the submarine-in-peril plot points as they occur, from the desperate maneuvers to avoid getting torpedoed to the rivet-popping dive below crush depth. Echoes of "Das Boot", "The Enemy Below" and "Run Silent Run Deep", but what "Phantom" lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution. There's something to be said for a movie that knows where it's going, knows how to get there, and with a workmanlike sense of focus, delivers the white-knuckle goods.
MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Edward Dmytryk
Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley,
Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki, Miles Mander
Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe spends a lot of time getting knocked unconscious, while trying to solve a case that involves some stolen jade, a couple of murders and a missing dame. This is pretty good, once you get used to Dick Powell playing Marlowe. He hasn't got the back-alley aura that Bogart and Mitchum brought to the role, but the film was pivotal in his career, a transition from lightweight leads in musicals to more mature, tough-guy parts. The drug-induced dream sequence is a highlight. Former child star Anne shirley married producer Adrian Scott the year after she made this, and never appeared on screen again.
BIG SUR (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael Polish
Jean-Marc Barr, Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas,
Radha Mitchell, Anthony Edwards, Balthazar Getty,
Patrick Fischler, Henry Thomas, Stana Katic
An ambitious attempt to make something cinematic out of Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel. It's 1960, and Jack's at least 10 years removed from the events he chronicled in "On the Road". He's 40 now, a reluctant icon, lost and unfocused and well on the way to drinking himself to death. (He would succeed at that eventually.) The story, such as it is, starts with Kerouac hanging out by himself at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin on the California coast. The setting's serene, rustic, idyllic, just the place (Jack hopes) to take a break from the demands of fame, think, read, do some writing and maybe dry out. After three days of this, Kerouac's bored. After three weeks, he's back in San Francisco, drinking and carousing with his fellow Beats. The movie shifts back and forth between the city, the cabin and Neal Cassady's house in Los Gatos the rest of the way. Writer/director Polish does a smart thing here, using voiceover narration throughout, and making the movie revolve around Kerouac's words. Kerouac admits he's a "word-spinner," not an "idea man," and he's right. He's a writer in love with language, but the ideas spin out of the words and evaporate almost as quickly as they form. Polish does something else that Walter Salles didn't manage nearly as well in the film version of "On the Road". He's found actors - Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac and Josh Lucas as Cassady - who look enough like their real-life counterparts to be credible playing them. Barr is especially good at capturing Kerouac's shifts in mood, from spontaneous joy to boozed-out gloom and all the stops in between. None of that makes "Big Sur" a movie for everybody. But for fans of the Beats, and Kerouac in particular, it's worth a serious look. And Barr's brooding, bemused performance comes as close to Jack Kerouac as anybody who's not Jack Kerouac seems likely to get.
THE BIG TRAIL (1930) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Raoul Walsh
John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, Tyrone Power,
Tully Marshall, Ed Brendel, Ian Keith
A landmark western about a wagon train rolling over the plains and deserts and mountains from Missouri to what's now the state of Washington. The movie was actually shot twice, in the standard aspect ratio of the time, and in an early 70-mm process called Grandeur. It flopped commercially - Depression-era theaters that had just converted to sound weren't ready to accommodate wide-screen projection - but Raoul Walsh, who had lost an eye not long before he made this, knew instinctively what to do with all that extra canvas. Viewed in its original form today, it's still a breathtaking picture to look at. A tall, lean kid named John Wayne, 23 at the time and almost a decade away from "Stagecoach", shows remarkable presence in the lead role.
YO-YO GIRL COP (2006) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Kenta Fukasaku
Aya Matsuura, Rika Ishikawa, Erika Miyoshi
Yui Okada, Hiroyuki Nagato, Shunsuke Kubozuka
A girl armed with a deadly yo-yo goes undercover in a high school that appears to specialize in bullying and bomb-building. Crazy, escapist action from Japan. The catfight with dueling yo-yos is a highlight.
SHADOWLANDS (1993) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Richard Attenborough
Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, Edward Hardwicke,
Joseph Mazzello, Michael Denison, John Wood
An intelligent tear-jerker about the relationship between the reserved and somewhat stuffy British novelist C.S. Lewis, who wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia", and his decidedly unstuffy American wife, the poet Joy Gresham. A movie about pain and how love helps us live with it. Winger got an Oscar nomination for her affecting, down-to-earth performance.
Richard Attenborough
(1923-2014)
WORDS AND PICTURES (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Fred Schepisi
Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Amy Tian,
Fred Negahban, Bruce Davison, Amy Brenneman
Dear Ms. Applebaum,
I saw "Words and Pictures" last night at our local $3 theater. Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche play high school teachers, and they do what they can to look drab and ordinary. Fat chance. He teaches writing and she teaches art, and they get into this war over which means of expression is the best. He's arrogant and she's abrasive, and she's got rheumatoid arthritis, which makes it hard to paint, and he's got a drinking problem, which makes it hard to write, so it's complicated. And (of course) they gradually, grudgingly fall in love. It's one of those movies where you forgive its contrivances because watching the stars go at it is so much fun. Juliette did her own painting, too, apparently. For $3 on a hot summer night, it was just the thing.
Nick
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Raoul Walsh
Douglas Fairbanks, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong,
Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Sojin, Brandon Hurst
Douglas Fairbanks was at his career peak when he made this sumptuous adventure based on the Arabian Nights. His acting is operatic, even by the standards of silent films, and the movie's a little long, but the production values are outstanding. (At the time of its release, this was the most expensive motion picture ever made.) As for the swaggering grace he brought to his stunt work, Fairbanks couldn't really defy gravity. He just made it look that way.
SICK GIRL (2006) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Lucky McKee
Erin Brown, Angela Bettis,
Jesse Hlubik, Marcia Bennett
A woman who's way too fond of bugs gets an unusual specimen in a package from Brazil. She adds it to the insect zoo she keeps in her apartment, and when her new girlfriend moves in, too, and the new bug goes missing, things get icky. An innocuous entry in the "Masters of Horror" television series, played mostly for laughs. Erin Brown, whose claim to screen immortality probably rides on her work as Misty Mundae, the queen of Seduction Cinema's straight-to-video nudie flicks, plays the girlfriend. She still can't act - that's part of her charm - but she does get topless for a moment or two. It's not hard to imagine what Seduction Cinema would do with something like this.
GOIN' TO TOWN (1935) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Alexander Hall
Mae West, Paul Cavanagh,
Ivan Lebedeff, Marjorie Gateson
Mae West takes on high society, but is high society ready for Mae West? This is almost certainly the only movie in which Mae West sings opera, and a good example of what she was able to get away with, even after the Production Code took effect. Nobody could slip a winking sexual reference between the lines and past the censors like Mae West.
