House of Frankenstein (1944)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Movie Star Moment: William Holden

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.