Alice In Wonderland (2010)

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.

Desert Island Classics / Take 3

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.