THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Sturges
Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach,
Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Horst Buchholz,
Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, Whit Bissell
An impoverished Mexican village hires a band of gunfighters to help them fight off an outlaw gang led by Eli Wallach. A western remake of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", and if there's no way it can equal the artistry of the original, it's still a pretty good movie. Brynner's the nominal star, but your attention keeps drifting to the supporting cast, especially McQueen, Coburn and Bronson, a few years before they made the A list. Elmer Bernstein's iconic theme would gain universal recognition in a long-running series of commercials for Marlboro cigarettes.
Eli Wallach
(1915-2014)
Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly
in "Bound"
Naomi Watts and Laura Harring
in "Mulholland Drive"
Pascale Bussières and Rachael Crawford
in "When Night Is Falling"
Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly
in "Personal Best"
Amanda Donohoe and Sammi Davis
in "The Rainbow"
Karyn Dwyer and Christina Cox
in "Better Than Chocolate"
Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko
in "Room In Rome"
Jane Adams and Parker Posey
in "The Anniversary Party"
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux
in "Blue Is the Warmest Color"
Amanda Plummer and Saskia Reeves
in "Butterfly Kiss"
TABU (2012) ¢ ¢
D: Miguel Gomes
Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira,
Carloto Cotta, Isabel Cardoso, Ivo Miller
This movie plays like a parody of a European art film. In fact, it is a European art film. It's in Portuguese. It's in black and white. It's in three parts. In the first part, a white man trekking through Africa sees the ghost of a woman who's been dead for 10 years, and then commits suicide by feeding himself to a crocodile. In the second part, an old woman with dementia approaches death, watched over by a neighbor and a live-in caregiver. In the third, an old man recalls a romantic adventure he once had with the same old woman who died in part two. The language is stiff. The rationalizing is ponderous. Some of the stylistic choices are strange, like in part three, where the story is narrated, and you can see the characters talking to each other, but you never hear anything they're saying. Maybe there's a point to that. Like this is a story filtered through an old man's memory, and some things, like what exactly people said to each other, and what their voices sounded like back then, are gone. Or maybe it's art. Or a parody of art. Heck, I don't know.
A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA (1946) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Archie Mayo
The Marx Brothers, Charles Drake, Lois Collier,
Sig Ruman, Lisette Verea, Dan Seymour
Groucho, Harpo and Chico run amok in Morocco, upsetting the plans of a Nazi who's already stuck with some unsightly dueling scars and an errant toupee. The Marx Brothers' best movies are all from the early 1930s. This one came later and it's no "Duck Soup", but some of the gags are pretty good. Try taking a drink or a toke every time Sig Ruman says "Schweinhund!" That could be fun.
ELYSIUM (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Neill Blomkamp
Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley,
Alice Braga, Wagner Moura, Diego Luna,
William Fichtner, Emma Tremblay
The first thing you see is a vast urban landscape in an advanced state of decay. And the first thing you think is, this looks like a sequel to "District 9". Which, in some ways, it is. It's by the same director, Neill Blomkamp, and it has a similar desiccated grittiness, an apocalyptic vision of a society and its machinery going to ruin. That hellish landscape is earth, and in the year 2154, that's where most of humanity lives. For the elite and the privileged, there's Elysium, a gleaming, pristine habitat on an orbiting space station, far removed from the teeming squalor below. One of the discarded millions down on the surface is an ex-con named Max (Matt Damon), a car-thief-turned-factory-worker who gets a massive dose of radiation on the job and learns he's got five days to live. One thing can save him: the advanced medical technology that only exists on Elysium. Where the subtext in "District 9" was apartheid, in "Elysium" it's immigration. The desperate inhabitants of earth will risk everything to get to a place that for them is literally heaven, boarding rattle-trap shuttles the Elysian defense forces routinely blow out of the sky. It's an action movie that dares to be about something besides monster robots and high-powered weaponry and violent men trying to beat each other to death. (It's about those things, too, of course.) The conclusion seems a little perfunctory, but Sharlto Copley (of "District 9") makes a wicked villain, and Jodie Foster, biting out orders in an accent all her own, has a good time as Elysium's ruthless defense minister, a protective mother who won't bat an eye over dealing with thugs, or plotting a coup, or orchestrating mass murder. It's not much of a part in some ways, but Foster takes what's there and runs with it. Mere earthlings had better stay out of her way.
POLLY OF THE CIRCUS (1932) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alfred Santell
Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Raymond Hatton,
C. Aubrey Smith, David Landau, Ruth Selwyn
Death-defying feats under the big top and soul-searching melodrama in the rectory, with Davies as a trapeze artist who takes a bad fall and ends up recuperating under the watchful care of the Reverend Clark Gable. This is believable to about the extent that Gable's believable as a man of the cloth, but there's no denying the ease with which he commands the screen. The supposedly scandalous outfits Davies performs in don't look all that shocking now.
NOAH (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Darren Aranofsky
Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone,
Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman,
Douglas Booth, Leo McHugh Carroll, Madison Davenport
Darren Aranofsky reimagines the Old Testament story, with surly, burly Russell Crowe as the guy who got all those animals on that great big boat. It's been a few years since I read Genesis, so I'm not sure about stuff like the fallen angels in the form of these rumbling giant rock monsters who help build the ark and fight off the marauding descendants of Cain. The sinners don't look like they're having much fun, either. They look like they're already in hell. So what's the point of sinning then? And what difference would it make? Where's Cecil B. DeMille when you really need him? That guy knew how to make sin look good. The effects do look good, and Aronofsky deftly solves the problem of how Noah got all the beasts of the world to share space in the ark without eating each other. Then the rain comes and the water rises and everybody except the Noah family and their oceangoing menagerie dies. Noah goes bonkers eventually. That'll happen sometimes, when you're dedicated to your work and your boss is both God and a remote-control psychopath. Bad crazyness really takes over when Noah becomes convinced that the Big Guy wants him to kill his own grandchildren. Jennifer Connelly, looking a little too fashionably thin, plays Mrs. Noah. Ray Winstone chews it up as the leader of Cain's army. Anthony Hopkins cackles away as Methuselah, Noah's grandfather, who makes an interesting cup of tea and has a particular fondness for berries. (Maybe that's what he puts in the tea.) The narrative holds up for the first 90 minutes or so. It goes over the rail about when Noah does, and the film never really recovers, but it still has some powerful moments, the Icelandic locations look stunning, and wait till you hear who's singing the lullaby over the closing credits.
ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Mark Robson
Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer,
Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Jason Robards
A shadowy Val Lewton thriller about some people quarantined on a Greek island during a plague. One of them could be possessed by en evil spirit, and it's probably not who you think. Moody lighting out of film noir and old German silents, and a good, moody performance by Karloff (looking vaguely like Kurt Vonnegut) as the army general who insists that nobody leave the island.
OUR NIXON (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Penny Lane
Tricky Dick through the eyes of three top aides - John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman and Dwight Chapin - all convicted felons in the Watergate cover-up and all armed, during their White House years, with Super 8 movie cameras. Television news footage and self-serving testimony complement the home movies, along with damning excerpts from the infamous Nixon tapes. There's nothing new here, really, but it's useful to be reminded, yet again, what a crude, needy, paranoid bastard we elected president once upon a time. That couldn't happen again, right?
NOWHERE TO GO (1958) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Seth Holt
George Nader, Maggie Smith,
Bernard Lee, Bessie Love
A thief fences some stolen coins, stashes the money in a safe deposit box, and then has a hell of a time reconnecting with the loot. A good, low-key film noir from England's Ealing Studio. Catchy jazz score. Maggie Smith's first film.
42 (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Brian Helgeland
Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford, Nicole Beharie,
Christopher Meloni, Lucas Black, John C. McGinley,
Andre Holland, Alan Tudyk, Ryan Merriman, Max Gail
An inspirational biopic about a genuine American hero. It's not a mark of honor for America or its national pastime that no black ballplayer appeared in a major league game till 1947. The player was Jackie Robinson, and he got the job (and paid the price for it) because Branch Rickey, the crusty, cigar-chomping owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, decided it was time to break down the wall. (He also saw that Robinson's hitting and speed could help him win ball games.) Robinson's route to the show was not easy. The racism he encountered was ugly, and the movie does nothing to finesse that. (The race-baiting behavior of Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman is especially repugnant.) Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson, a proud, gifted, strong-willed guy pushed to the limit by a situation that requires him to show courage by not fighting back. He captures not only Robinson's competitive nature and submerged anger, but the exhausting toll the battle took on his psyche. Harrison Ford plays Rickey, and if you look and listen closely enough, you can tell it's Harrison Ford, but mostly what you see is Branch Rickey, hard-assed, uncompromising and larger-than-life. Not many actors share Ford's capacity for understatement, and not many actors could play such an over-the-top character without going over the top. It's a great part for a 70-year-old star making the transition from heroes to character parts, and it leaves you hoping it's only the beginning. You'd like to see a lot more of the new old Harrison Ford.
THE PENALTY (1920) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Wallace Worsley
Lon Chaney, Ethel Grey Terry, Charles Clary,
Claire Adams, Kenneth Harlan, James Mason
Lon Chaney in one of his most physically demanding roles, as Blizzard, the legless king of the San Francisco underworld. Posing for a bust of Satan, Blizzard hatches an insane plan to import a gangster army, loot the city, acquire a new pair of legs and get revenge on the doctor who amputated his old ones. Chaney goes over the top at times - if he had a handlebar moustache, he'd be twirling it - but his ability to affect the appearance of an amputee, without camera tricks and without actually being an amputee, is astonishing. If you didn't know he had legs, you'd never know.
RUST AND BONE (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Jacques Audiard
Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts,
Armand Verdure, Céline Sallette
This movie's about coping with damage, emotional and physical. Marion Cotillard plays a woman named Stéphanie, who trains and performs with orcas at a water show in the South of France. At least, she does that till an accident at work forces the amputation of both of her legs. Matthias Schoenaerts plays a man named Ali, a bare-knuckles boxer, nightclub bouncer and security guard, an impoverished single dad with a five-year-old son. It's a romance, but a grudging one. Stéphanie and Ali are both closed off and self-destructive, as hard on each other as they are on themselves. They're not much for sentiment, either of them, and they need each other more than either of them can acknowledge or express. Toward the end, they're on the phone, talking. There's a long pause, and you think this is it, they're going to hang up, they're finished. But they don't, and they're not, because, after all, where else would either of them go? The whole movie's like that. Like its two flawed, damaged characters, it doesn't go out of its way to make you care. And you end up caring anyway.
