Spring Breakers (2012)

SPRING BREAKERS  (2012)  ¢ ¢
    D: Harmony Korine
    James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens,
    Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane
Harmony Korine's leering take on springtime in Florida plays like a wet dream gone to the dark side. It's about some college girls who stage a robbery to finance their trip to St. Pete, where they quickly get caught up in the bacchanal: the coke-snorting, beer-bonging, tit-flashing, brain-negative frolic that spring break apparently wouldn't be spring break without. Then they get busted for dope - it's not real clear how - and hauled before a judge, still looking hot after a night in jail in their finest primary-color bikinis. A dope dealer played by James Franco bails them out, and one look at his teeth should be enough to scare them off, but, no, they stick around (all except the good-girl Christian one played by Selena Gomez), and pretty soon they're getting into real danger, playing with guns. Gomez plays the only girl in the bunch with anything resembling a personality. The other three (all blondes) are indistinguishable. Franco rips into his role for all it's worth, making you wonder how much was scripted and how much was improvised. At least you know he had a good time. Korine does know how to keep you on edge, but the story makes no sense at all, and it's unclear what his idea was here, or whether he even had one - some subversive commentary on the current state of the American dream, or a pseudo-hip gangsta flick with an order of skin on the side.

Carefree (1938)

CAREFREE  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mark Sandrich
    Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ralph Bellamy,
    Luella Gear, Jack Carson, Franklin Pangborn
Ginger's all set to marry Ralph Bellamy when Fred suggests she change partners and dance. Who do you think she'll end up dancing with? Go ahead. Take a guess.

Flashback: Vinyl Soundtracks

   I first started collecting and listening to movie music in my early teens. It made me a musical oddity. While most of our Madison classmates tuned into top-40 rock & roll, my colleague Dr. Sporgersi and I would ride the bus up to Wolff Kubly & Hirsig, a sort of general merchandise store on the Square, and browse through the soundtrack albums. 
    Wolff Kubly was one of those places in the early 1960s where you could actually take a new record out of its cover, put it on a turntable and listen to it right there in the store. You didn't have to buy it, or anything. Dr. Sporgersi and I took advantage of that. A lot.
    As I remember it, his favorite Wolff Kubly album was the soundtrack to "Spartacus" with music by Alex North. I liked Ernest Gold's score from "Exodus". We listened to them over and over, and I'm sure the underpaid clerks at Wolff Kubly weren't too crazy about us doing that, but I don't remember ever being told not to. 
    And I suppose it paid off. Dr. Sporgersi eventually bought the "Spartacus" soundtrack. And I bought the music from "Exodus" on what at the time was the equivalent of an EP: an abbreviated version of a long-playing album, two cuts on each side of a 33-rpm disc the size of a 45. Not much music was released that way back then, and I wish now that I'd kept that record, but of course, it's long gone. I think I wore it out playing it. It was the first recorded music I ever owned. 
    Relative poverty kept my purchases in check in the years that followed. Mostly I shopped the sales. I remember finding a copy of Elmer Bernstein's score from "The Buccaneer" for 50 cents at Ward Brodt Music. But the best place to buy bargain-priced movie music in Madison was a discount department store on Milwaukee Street called Arlan's.
    The Arlan's record department had a massive cutout bin, and the cutout soundtracks there went three for a dollar. Which meant that if I had two bucks in my pocket (and a few cents for the sales tax), I could take home six albums. A lot of it was music I'd never heard, from movies I'd never seen. But if even one or two of those albums turned out to be any good at all, I hadn't wasted my money. It was a worthwhile risk. 
    So I bought a lot of vinyl, and came to recognize the different composers and their signature sounds. Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, Maurice Jarre: They were the great ones. It was a golden age for movie music, and I was listening in. 
    I've still got most of those records. Some friends are storing them for me. It's been years since I've listened to them, or had anything to play them on. But I can't seem to get rid of them, either. I keep thinking that maybe they'll be worth something someday. Or maybe someday I'll get another turntable. I don't know.
    I guess it's just kind of nice to know they're there, relics from my movie-going, music-listening past. Mancini's score from "Charade". Bernstein's "To Kill a Mockingbird". Barry's James Bond music. Goldsmith's title theme from "The Chairman". Jarre's "Behold a Pale Horse". 
    For now, they're doing time in somebody's basement, records in boxes, gathering dust and waiting. Waiting for the needle to drop into the groove once more. Waiting to bring a memory of some flickering image to life. Waiting for a moment that might never come. Waiting to be heard again.

Jin (2013)

JIN  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Reha Erdem
    Deniz Hasgüler, Onur Ünsal, Sabahattin Yakut
This movie's about a girl on the run. It plays like a dream or a fairy tale. Her name's Jin, though she sometimes goes by Leyla, a name she picks up along the way. She's Kurdish, and as the movie begins, she's with a band of guerillas somewhere near the Turkish border. The  guerillas make camp in some caves, and Jin slips away, taking off on her own, apparently hoping to get back to her family. She treks over the rugged, exotic terrain. Filches food where she can. Swipes some civilian clothes. Hitches a few rides and almost gets raped a couple of times. Survives by her wits and an instinct for when to accept the kindness of strangers and when to bolt. But she can't escape the war, or the artillery fire that shatters the quiet and blasts the landscape and always seems to be directed at her. She runs. She hides. She climbs trees. She cowers in caves. She doubles back to where she was before. She can't escape. She can't escape.

Texas Terror (1935)

TEXAS TERROR  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert N. Bradbury
    John Wayne, Lucille Browne, Leroy Mason,
    Fern Emmett, George Hayes, Buffalo Bill Jr.
Sheriff John Wayne hits the skids for a while, after apparently shooting his best friend in a gun battle. His outlook improves when the dead man's pretty young daughter turns up, but how can he tell her that he's the guy who killed her old man? This is marginally more complex than most of the formula westerns Wayne cranked out before "Stagecoach", and there's a darkness to his character that hints at the haunted men he'd play later on for Ford and Hawks. There's even a scene where he briefly talks in a falsetto. Try finding that in another John Wayne movie.

Movie 43 (2013)

MOVIE 43  (2013)  ¢ ¢
    D: Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, James Gunn,
    Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Grifffin Dunne,
    Peter Farrelly, Jonathan van Tulleken, Steve Carr,
    Patrick Forsberg, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner,
    C: Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Hugh Jackman,
    Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts,
    Uma Thurman, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, 
    Kate Bosworth, Chloë Grace Moretz, Common,
    Seth McFarlane, Kieran Culkin, Justin Long,
    Bobby Cannavale, Gerard Butler, Halle Berry,
    Elizabeth Banks, Josh Duhamel, Anna Faris,
    Terrence Howard, Patrick Warburton, Kristen Bell
An A-list cast slums its way through a raunchy comedy cooked up and co-directed by one of the Farrelly Brothers. It opens with a desperate filmmaker (Dennis Quaid) pitching a story idea to a producer played by Greg Kinnear. That sets up a series of sketches that mostly take one joke each and hammer it into the ground. "Highlight" is probably the wrong word to use with something like this, when the options include Chloë Grace Moretz suffering through her first period, a guy having an explosive bowel movement that covers an entire city street, and Elizabeth Banks being massively sprayed by an angry cartoon cat. But I'm guessing the image you'll remember, whether you want to or not, has to do with Hugh Jackman's  neck. If you see it, you'll know what I mean.

Two English Girls (1971)

TWO ENGLISH GIRLS  (1971)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Francois Truffaut
    Jean-Pierre Leaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter,
    Sylvia Marriott, Marie Mansart, Philippe Leotard
A solemn young Frenchman travels to Wales, where he stays with and falls for the two English girls of the title. A brooding romance in which the three lead characters are as fated to fall in love as they are to be made miserable by it. Also, it's the early 20th century, and they've apparently got money, so they read books and play badminton and go for long walks and their manners are quite formal, and it takes them forever to come to terms with how they really feel. Nice location work in Wales, though. There are much worse places to fall desperately, miserably in love. 

From Here To Eternity (1953)

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fred Zinnemann
    Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift,
    Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Ernest Borgnine,
    Philip Ober, Jack Warden, Claude Akins
The great military potboiler about soldiers and their women in Hawaii in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. The men are perfectly typecast - Lancaster as the tough but fair career man, Sgt. Warden, Sinatra as the cocky, party-loving Pvt. Maggio, and Clift as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, an uncompromising "hardhead" who loves the Army but doesn't like to be told what to do. The women are cast against type, and that works, too - Kerr as a heat-seeking officer's wife who hooks up with Lancaster, and Reed as a bar girl who gets involved with Clift. All five leads got nominated for Oscars, and Reed and Sinatra won. The movie's full of unforgettable moments, and the shot of Kerr and Lancaster making out in the surf is iconic. A personal favorite: Lancaster and Clift, both shitfaced, sharing a bottle in the middle of the road. 

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
    Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake,
    John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham
The Coen Brothers go back to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s to create a study in self-inflicted desolation about a musician whose career has stalled out between club gigs that don't pay and an album that won't sell. It probably doesn't help that he's a gloomy, anti-social, self-destructive prick. The movie follows him in a rambling, episodic way as he scuffles around New York, sleeping on couches and trying to decide whether he wants to stick it out, or go back to sea with the merchant marine. There's also a side trip to Chicago, which is like a Coen Brothers version of the road trip from hell, with a chain-smoking Peter Orlovsky enthusiast behind the wheel and an obnoxious cripple in the back seat. The cripple's played by John Goodman, I guess because in a Coen Brothers movie there's got to be a cameo for John Goodman somewhere. When I watched this, I didn't like it very much. I just didn't like any of the characters. Then a couple days later, I caught the trailer when I went to see another film, and it looked pretty funny. So I guess it's a comedy, all cold streets and wet shoes and lost cats and miserable people, painted over in a deep shade of Coen Brothers black. If you don't have enough despair in your life, and you're a fan of what they're done before, it's probably worth the risk. 

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

GODZILLA VS. KING GHIDORAH  (1991)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kazuki Ohmori
    Kosuke Toyohara, Anna Nakagawa, Megumi Odaka,
    Akiji Kobayashi, Kenji Sahara, Chuck Wilson
Giant monsters take turns terrorizing Japan, and any connection between the dialogue on the soundtrack and the movement of the actors' lips is accidental. A highlight (from the "What's Up, Tiger Lily" school of dubbing) comes when a Japanese actress playing a Japanese character in a Japanese movie enlightens her Japanese colleagues by announcing matter-of-factly, "I'm Japanese."

Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Abdellatif Kechiche
    Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Salim Kechiouche,
    Benjamin Siksou, Mona Walravens, Alma Jodorowsky
A three-hour movie about two girls in love. Adèle Exarchopoulos (brown eyes, brown hair) plays Adèle, watchful, tentative, a high school student still trying to figure things out and fit in. Léa Seydoux (blue eyes, blue hair) plays Emma, older, in college, an adventurous free spirit who has all the outgoing self-confidence Adèle lacks. They exchange glances on the street, run into each other at a nightclub, hang out together on a park bench, and fall in love. The love scenes in this got a lot of attention and earned the film an NC-17 rating. They're as hot as anything ever in a mainstream movie (leave it to the French), but that's not all the movie's about. It's about growing and changing, identity and risk and acceptance and finding your place in the world. What's more intimate than the naked groping and smooching and butt-slapping is the way Kechiche's camera closes in on the faces of the two leads and stays there, leaving them completely exposed, with nothing to cover up with and nowhere to hide. Exarchopoulos, especially, is amazing, playing an emotional open book trying, without knowing quite how, to project an air of composure and control. The film's original title is "Adèle's Life: Chapters 1 & 2", suggesting that more chapters will follow. That might not happen. It's been reported that Seydoux and Exarchopoulos were not entirely happy working with Kechiche, and the movie leaves you with a real sense that both characters have moved on. We haven't seen the last of the actresses playing them, that's for sure.

Blonde Savage (1947)

BLONDE SAVAGE  (1947)  ¢ ¢
    D: Steve Sekely
    Leif Erickson, Gale Sherwood, Frank Jenks,
    Ernest Whitman, Veda Ann Borg, Matt Willis,
    Douglas Dumbrille, John Dehner, Cay Forester
A pair of adventurers head out into the African bush, where they find a young white woman living among the natives and some clues to a long-ago murder. You could probably watch this movie in the time it takes to mow the lawn, and mowing the lawn might pack more excitement. The high point comes when the white woman sings lead vocal in the tribe's war chant, but then the warriors go off into battle and get wiped out anyway. Where's Johnny Weissmuller when you really need him?

Epic (2013)

EPIC  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Chris Wedge
Wee creatures of the forest fight back against daunting odds when their idyllic habitat is threatened by an evil entity with a voice like Christoph Waltz. Remember "FernGully" and "Princess Mononoke"? This is kind of like that. It's also kind of like "Avatar" and "How To Train Your Dragon", except that instead of raptors, the heroes are flying around on the backs of hummingbirds. That doesn't mean it's not epic. It's just a matter of scale.