Stripes (1981)

STRIPES  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ivan Reitman
    Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Warren Oates,
    P.J. Soles, Sean Young, John Candy, John Diehl,
    John Larroquette, Judge Reinhold, Conrad Dunn,
    Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, Nick Toth, Bill Paxton
Arguably Bill Murray's funniest movie, with Murray and Harold Ramis as aging slackers who dare each other into joining the Army. It's like "Animal House" in uniform, with lots of crazy gags, a fine Elmer Bernstein musical score, and a great supporting cast led by Warren Oates as a crafty, old-school drill instructor. Ramis, who cowrote the script, makes a perfect straight man for Murray's smirky brand of humor. He doesn't even try to keep a straight face. 

Harold Ramis

(1944-2014)

Listomania / Take 4

Dying young doesn't guarantee your status as a Hollywood legend, but it doesn't seem to hurt. Here are some actors who managed to check out before the age of 50:

                          Rudolph Valentino
                          Jean Harlow
                          James Dean
                          Leslie Howard
                          Carole Lombard
                          Philip Seymour Hoffman
                          Jean Seberg
                          Montgomery Clift
                          Judy Garland
                          Heath Ledger
                          Marilyn Monroe
                          Elvis Presley
                          River Phoenix
                          John Garfield
                          John Belushi
                          Bruce Lee

Nebraska (2013)

NEBRASKA  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alexander Payne
    Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach,
    Bob Odenkirk, Rance Howard, Mary Louise Wilson
Northern Plains Gothic, with Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, a crotchety old coot living out his twilight years in Billings, Montana, and fighting back with sheer orneriness against the combined forces of age and the universe. When he gets a sweepstakes come-on in the mail, the bold print convinces him he's won a million dollars, and Woody decides he has to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his prize. (The fine print he never bothers to read. Why the hell should he?) So the movie's about Woody and his son David (Will Forte) heading off to Lincoln together and what happens to them along the way. It's about the bond between fathers and sons, or, as my colleague Dr. Sporgersi put it, "a chick flick for guys." It's affecting without ever tipping over into sentimentality. Dern's no-bullshit performance takes care of that. It was shot on location in black and white. The set design is unadorned. Payne's approach is just to go into these places - houses and diners and bars - and film there. There's no Hollywood polish at all. When Woody walks into a tavern, you know what the place smells like. When he tips a bottle to his lips, you can practically taste the beer. There are as many funny moments as melancholy ones, and some are both at once. Take the scene at the cemetery, where Woody, his wife Kate (June Squibb) and David have gone to visit the graves of some of Woody's relatives. While Kate delivers a hilariously unfiltered monologue about all the sins and imperfections of the souls beneath the stones, Woody stands off to the side, not listening, or maybe not hearing. He's in another world, lost in time, in the folds and currents of a memory that's maybe starting to slip. Dern doesn't do much except stand there, but it's enough, in a movie where words don't always mean a whole lot, and silence, sometimes, tells you everything you need to know. 

Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Blake Edwards

    Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal,

    Mickey Rooney, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Balsam,

    John McGiver, Dorothy Whitney, Alan Reed

For most people, the iconic image of Audrey Hepburn is probably one from "Breakfast At Tiffany's": either the shot of Audrey in giant sunglasses window-shopping at the start of the film, or the art from the movie's poster, where she's striking a demure, devil-may-care pose with a cigarette holder that looks about three feet long. The movie's based on a Truman Capote novella, and Hepburn stars as Holly Golightly, a reckless, fun-loving free spirit who makes ends meet by peddling her favors to wealthy men. George Peppard, in what's got to be his best role, plays Paul Varjak, an aspiring writer who's just moved into Holly's Manhattan apartment building. Paul has a wealthy patron himself, a personal "decorator" (Patricia Neal) who's helping him cover expenses till his writing takes off. What's constantly alluded to but never explicitly stated is that both Paul and Holly are prostitutes. (Holly's standard fee, collected from her affluent dates, is a flat $50 "for the powder room.") There's an edge to Holly that's hard to find in any other Hepburn character: brittle, impulsive and self-destructive, congenitally predisposed to steal hearts and break them and not look back. Capote thought she was wrong for the part - he wanted Marilyn Monroe - but if it's not Hepburn's most affecting performance, it's pretty darn close. The Henry Mancini score includes "Moon River", which Hepburn sings. Mickey Rooney does a bizarre slapstick turn as Holly's frazzled Japanese neighbor.

In Another Country (2012)

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Hong Sang-Soo
    Isabelle Huppert, Yu Jun-Sang, Moon So-Ri
Isabelle Huppert stars in a trilogy of stories about three different women named Anne, who all turn up at the same guest house in the same small town on the Korean coast. One Anne is a filmmaker on a brief holiday. Another's a teacher whose husband has left her for a Korean woman. The third is a businessman's wife who's cheating on her husband with a Korean man. The same moonstruck lifeguard plays a role in all three stories. So do alcohol and a lighthouse and the sea. English is the common language, but nobody speaks it very well. The stories are slight, but they have their own pace and rhythm, precisely composed variations on a theme. And there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than looking at Isabelle Huppert. 

Silent Movie (1976)

SILENT MOVIE  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mel Brooks
    Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise,
    Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters, Marcel Marceau,
    Harold Gould, Chuck McCann, Valerie Curtin,
    Burt Reynolds, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman
An almost silent comedy with Mel, Dom and Marty as Hollywood players trying to land enough big-name stars to persuade a beleaguered studio chief (Sid Caesar) to let them make a silent movie. A 90-minute barrage of crazy sight gags that works best as a showcase for Feldman, who in another era would've made a great silent clown. It contains exactly one word of dialogue, spoken by the cast member you'd least expect to pierce the silent wall.

Sid Caesar

(1922-2014)

Sunshine State (2002)

SUNSHINE STATE  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Sayles
    Edie Falco, Timothy Hutton, Angela Bassett,
    Jane Alexander, Mary Steenburgen, Ralph Waite,
    Bill Cobbs, Miguel Ferrer, Alan King
After previous stopovers in Ireland ("The Secret of Roan Inish"), Texas ("Lone Star"), Latin America ("Men With Guns") and Alaska ("Limbo"), John Sayles touches down in Florida with a story about greedy developers out to pave over a strip of beachfront property at the expense of those who lack the money and clout to stop them. A soap opera with a message, playing on a theme Sayles has explored before: how the past has a way of haunting the present, no matter what we do to try to move on from it. Sayles hasn't got Robert Altman's fluid dexterity with ensembles. (Who does?) But he's got a good ensemble cast, and he makes some interesting choices, like the way he holds a closeup of Mary Steenburgen - and holds it, and holds it - while the civic event she's compulsively organized goes on a few feet away, offscreen. If you're looking for the movie's soul, that'd be Edie Falco as a burned-out motel owner and ex-mermaid named Marly. One look at her face, and you know exactly what Sayles found in Florida: It's the place dreams go to die.

Ralph Waite

(1928-2014)

Dracula (1931)

DRACULA  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tod Browning
    Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Helen Chandler,
    Dwight Frye, Edward Van Sloan, Frances Dade
The definitive Hollywood vampire movie, with Bela Lugosi in his signature role as the elegant, accented Count. Browning had already made a silent vampire movie called "London After Midnight" with Lon Chaney, who would've played the lead in this, if he had lived. The storytelling is visual as much as it is verbal, an effective technical bridge between silents and sound. The music is Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". The pace is hypnotically slow. Lugosi's stately performance has been imitated often but never outdone, and Dwight Frye stakes his claim to horror-movie immortality as the mad, spider-eating Renfield. The studio was Universal. It had to be.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

ZERO DARK THIRTY  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kathryn Bigelow
    Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler,
    Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Strong
Kathryn Bigelow's black-ops procedural about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, starring Jessica Chastain as an obsessed CIA analyst who spends years on the case. The first 30 or 40 minutes are a trip to the dark side - a series of torture sessions in which Chastain and a fellow op (Jason Clarke) try to extract information from chained, filthy, sleep-deprived prisoners using "enhanced interrogation techniques." (How much useful intelligence was actually gained that way remains unclear.) Bigelow orchestrates the suspense and logistics with her customary cold-eyed skill, but character development is minimal and the emotional stakes remain relatively low. So, yeah, it's a well-made film and it raises questions that could (and probably should) make you feel uncomfortable. It might even get you rooting for the good-guy American commandos to nail the bastard who engineered the attacks on 9/11. Just don't be surprised if you feel a little dirty afterward. 

The King of Kings (1927)

THE KING OF KINGS  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Cecil B. DeMille
    H.B. Warner, Ernest Torrance, Dorothy Cumming,
    Joseph Schildkraut, Jacqueline Logan, Joseph Striker,
    Sam De Grasse, William Boyd, Montagu Love
DeMille's silent version of the life of Christ plays fast and loose with the gospels while delivering all the sin and sanctity that were the director's trademark. It's really a series of exquisitely composed tableaux, a couple of them in early Technicolor, and if the pace sometimes drags, what you see on the screen never looks less than spectacular. The lavish decadence of Mary Magdalene's court has everything to do with DeMille and nothing to do with first-century Palestine.

Capote (2005)

CAPOTE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bennett Miller
    Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, 
    Clifton Collins Jr., Mark Pellegrino, 
    Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban
Philip Seymour Hoffman channels Truman Capote in a film about the time Capote spent in the late '50s and early '60s writing and researching "In Cold Blood". You get a sense of the movie's tone at the very start. A car pulls up to an isolated Kansas farm house, and a teenaged girl gets out and walks up to the door. She knocks but there's no answer, so she goes inside. She calls out but the house is quiet, so she starts looking around and goes upstairs. When she looks into one of the rooms and sees a body on a bed with its head half blown off and blood splattered on the wall, she lets out a strangled yelp, something between a shriek and a gasp, that catches in her throat. Just when, in any other movie, the girl would scream, she's silent, stunned, paralyzed. A day or two later, Truman Capote arrives to investigate what happened for a magazine article that will evolve into his groundbreaking "non-fiction novel." Decked out in a long, flowing scarf and an ankle-length camel's hair coat, Capote isn't just a fish out of water, he's a being from another planet. And that's before he opens his mouth. Good thing his old pal Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) is there to help run interference with the the good people of Kansas. The challenge in playing somebody as outwardly flamboyant as Capote is to get beyond the caricature, and Hoffman does that, using the famous poses and mannerisms as a starting point and reaching beneath them to reveal a brilliant, dedicated writer who's also a vain, manipulative monster, the self-obsessed center of his own peculiar universe. There's a hint of Brando in some of Hoffman's moves and mumbled inflections, and the performance itself is a tour de force, the case of a great actor in what stands to be the role of his career. It's a mark of Miller's skill behind the camera, and Hoffman's in front of it, that the actor doesn't overwhelm the film, while the film itself would be unimaginable without its lead performance. You can't help wondering, too, what the real Capote would say, if he knew that 20 years after his death, people would be making movies about him. Something bitchy, no doubt.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

(1967-2014)

Marlene (1984)

MARLENE  (1984)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Maximilian Schell
Maximilian Schell's documentary on Marlene Dietrich, made with Dietrich's guarded cooperation and put together under a severely limiting restriction: Dietrich, then in her 80s, agreed to be interviewed, but adamantly refused to be photographed. The result is a movie about itself, and Schell's obsession with making it, as much as it is about the legendary actress. Remarkably, it works both ways. The more Dietrich spurns Schell's overtures, the more she reveals about herself, and the more Schell struggles with his inability to shoot the thing his movie is about, the more inventive he becomes. Eventually it all breaks down into cinematic chaos, with Dietrich on a tirade against Schell's romanticism, his persistent interrogation and even his parentage, while Schell fills the screen with Felliniesque images that capture the filmmaker's growing frustration over the impact her intransigence is having on his film. The finished product might not be entirely coherent, but there isn't another documentary quite like it. Definitely  worth checking out.

Maximilian Schell

(1930-2014)

Oldboy (2013)

OLDBOY  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Spike Lee
    Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley,
    Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli, Max Casella
Josh Brolin plays an ad salesman named Joe Doucette, an asshole who only changes character when he drinks and becomes an even bigger asshole. Then one night, after blowing a big sale (by being an asshole) and getting drunker than usual, Joe's inexplicably  kidnapped. When  he comes to, he's locked in what looks like a drab hotel room, where he's fed a steady diet of Asian dumplings and vodka, and that's where he spends the next 20 years, not knowing who put him there, but determined to get even once he gets out. And then he gets out. This almost gets by as a cinematic exercise - it's a remake of a Korean movie from 2003 - but it's hard to engage in a story that's not remotely believable, or a lead character who's not remotely worth caring about. Maybe the context is wrong, or maybe it takes a Tarantino or a John Woo to shift something like this from Asia to the West and get it right. "Oldboy" leaves plenty of blood on the floor. What it needs is more tongue in its cheek.