THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Z. Leonard
William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer,
Frank Morgan, Virginia Bruce, Reginald Owen,
Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger, Nat Pendleton
An elaborate musical biography of the early 20th century's master showman, with William Powell in the title role, and a lot of vintage variety acts. Highlights include routines by Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, and a couple of stupendous production numbers. (The narrative goes on vacation for a reel at a time, when the girls and costumes take over.) Among the curiosities: an actor who looks exactly like Will Rogers playing Will Rogers, rope tricks and all, and a song-and-dance routine to "If You Knew Susie" with an Eddie Cantor impersonator in blackface. The picture and Luise Rainer both won Academy Awards.
Luise Rainer
(1910-2014)
HORS SATAN (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Bruno Dumont
David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre,
Christophe Bon, Aurore Broutin
There's a guy who lives in a makeshift camp down by the beach. He looks like a vagrant. The area around there is rural: corn fields, patches of tall marsh grass and pastures where cattle graze. The vagrant lives off handouts from the nearby houses, and there's this one girl especially, a vaguely punk-looking young woman with pale skin and spiky black hair, who gives him sandwiches and apparently washes his clothes. The two of them take long walks together, and sometimes when she's in a tough spot, he helps her out. He seems to have magical powers, but whether he's an angel, or a demon, or something else, is hard to say. The woman offers herself to him, but he says no. He doesn't tell her why. He just tells her that's how it is. There's no music except for the sounds of birds. There are a lot of long takes. A lot of tight closeups and pensive stares. To make something like this work, you need actors with charisma, and the movie has two of them: David Dewaele who plays the vagrant and Alexandra Lemâtre who plays the girl. You don't really know what's going on in it, or where it's going to go, or even what it's about. That's how it hooks you. You keep watching because you want to find out.
SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK (1921) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Max Linder
Max Linder, Alta Allen, Ralph McCullough
Max Linder was a French silent comic who achieved worldwide fame before Charlie Chaplin ever stepped in front of a camera. He was injured while serving in the First World War (some accounts say he was exposed to poison gas) and made fewer films after that, some in Europe and some in the United States. In this Hollywood production, a broken mirror triggers a series of sight gags, some of them real funny. The best ones involve the mirror, an impromptu dance, a glue pot and a lion. Unfortunately, depression and the war had caused Linder's health to deteriorate, and his career faded as Chaplin's peaked. He and his wife committed suicide together in 1925.
IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Hans Petter Moland
Stellan Skarsgård, Bruno Ganz, Pål Sverre Hagen,
Birgitte Hjort Sorenson, Jakob Oftebro
A stone-cold comedy from Norway about an award-winning snowplow driver who decides to get even when somebody murders his son. "Fargo" meets "Lillehammer" somewhere in here. Who knew snowplow drivers could be so lethal?
COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA (1952) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Daniel Mann
Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster,
Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel
Shirley Booth recreates her Broadway role as a dowdy, middle-aged housewife trying to cope with loneliness, the passage of time and her husband's battle with alcohol. Lancaster plays the husband, a chiropractor who's just completed his first year in A.A. Booth won an Oscar for her performance, and with her nonstop chatter and whiny voice, you can see why Burt's character might reach for the bottle now and then. You also get a real sense of her underlying good nature, and her desperation. Lancaster's miscast - he looks too young and too fit - but his inclination to take on something like this sent a signal early on that he was an actor and a movie star who didn't mind taking dramatic risks. The film doesn't open the play up much. Most of it's set in just two rooms - a living room and a kitchen. The result is a suffocating closeness, like you're stuck in this intimate prison shared by two unhappy people, fighting to salvage what remains of their lives in the twilight of dreams long gone.
AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ
D: Nancy Buirski (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
A documentary on the long life and tragically brief career of Tanaquil Le Clercq, a tall, elegant ballerina whose artistry and breathtaking beauty made her the muse to both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. A pretty prima donna with a domineering mother, driven to meet impossible demands, sometimes sweet, sometimes cranky, sometimes an emotional wreck: Le Clercq could be the real-life model for "Black Swan". She was just reaching her peak in the mid-1950s, when polio struck her down at 26. She lived to be 71, confined to an iron lung and then a wheelchair. She never danced again. The movie's effective as an appreciation of Le Clercq's significance in the world of classical dance, but as a record of her life, it feels sketchy and unfocused. The archival footage of her dancing is in fuzzy black and white. (In a televised piece choreographed specifically for the March of Dimes, she does a pas de deux with Balanchine himself playing Polio.) That's where the film strikes a chord, and that's where it probably should. The irony is eerie and inescapable. You feel like you're watching a ghost.
PHINEAS AND FERB:
A VERY PERRY CHRISTMAS (2009/2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Zac Moncrief, Jay Lender, Robert F. Hughes
Chances are, unless you've got kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews of a certain age, you've never even heard of Phineas and Ferb. If that's the case, here's the scoop. "Phineas and Ferb" is a Disney cartoon series about two stepbrothers who live in a town called Danville and have lots of wildly imagined adventures over a summer vacation that goes on forever, or 104 days, whichever comes last. Phineas is the idea man. (His signature line: "I know what we're gonna do today!") Ferb is the engineer, the quiet kid who can build anything and brings those fabulous ideas to life. Their endearingly vain and shallow sister Candace is a few years older and determined to bust them, which she never quite manages to do. Perry, their pet platypus, transforms into the daring and intrepid "Agent P" whenever somebody asks, "Where's Perry?", which somebody always does. Agent P's archenemy is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz (of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.), who in every episode has just invented some new high-tech beam apparatus designed to bring darkness and doom to the entire Tri-State Area. Are you still with me? It doesn't matter. The show's full of jokes and puns and cultural references that will amuse the grownups while flying right by their children, who will still find something to relate to in the show's animated characters. The closest thing I could compare it to is "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle", if you're old enough to remember that. The highlight of this DVD compilation is a 33-minute story called "Christmas Vacation!", in which the kids and Perry try to stop Dr. Doofenshmirtz from tricking Santa into skipping his annual Christmas drop over Danville. It's not as tightly plotted as some of the shorter episodes, but all the characters are in play, doing what they do best. Four of the shorter (12-minute) episodes are included on the DVD. If the current vapid state of kids' entertainment is driving you nuts, give it a shot. You might like it. Your kids might like it. It might make you all want to watch more "Phineas and Ferb".
BYZANTIUM (2013) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Neil Jordan
Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton, Sam Riley,
Jonny Lee Miller, Kate Ashfield, Daniel Mays
A mother-and-daughter vampire team travels from town to town, feeding when the opportunity presents itself and getting by on the money mom makes as a hooker and exotic dancer - a line of work not many 200-year-old women who aren't vampires would be able to sustain. A convoluted storyline and some thinly sketched characters undercut the suspense, and it's never as scary as you'd like a vampire movie to be, but Jordan gets some nice atmospherics from a lighting scheme that looks dim even on a sunny day, and he sure doesn't skimp on the blood - there are rivers of it. Ronan's understated performance as the younger vampire almost makes you believe she could be a creature who's been tapping veins since the early 19th century. And if she should show up at your door when you're old and infirm and ready to move on to the other side, you could do yourself a favor. You could let her in.
The players who show up for work and get the job done year in and year out don't always take home the big prizes. None of the following actors (so far) has ever won an Academy Award:
Bill Murray
Nick Nolte
Willem Dafoe
Harvey Keitel
Edward Norton
Jeff Daniels
Ed Harris
Steve Buscemi
Woody Harrelson
Donald Sutherland
CITIZEN KANE (1941) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Orson Welles
Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane,
Dorothy Comingore, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins,
Agnes Moorhead, George Coulouris, Paul Stewart
Rosebud.
THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE (1996) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael Epstein, Thomas Lennon
An Oscar-nominated documentary about the lives of Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst, and how they converged and collided in Welles' 1941 masterpiece. An ironic study in life and illusion, filled with illuminating clips from "Kane", and commentary by Robert Wise, Jimmy Breslin, Peter Bogdanovich and others. Hearst the newspaper publisher and Welles the filmmaker were both larger-than-life characters with immense appetites and abilities, and in a clash of colossal egos, both miscalculated. Welles thought he could take on Hearst and get away with it. He couldn't. Hearst thought he could control the public's access to Welles' picture, if he had to, by destroying it. He couldn't do that, either. The only winner in the end was "Citizen Kane", which survives both men, and reflects both of their lives in ways neither of them could have anticipated or intended.
HER (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Spike Jonze
Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams,
Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Matt Letscher, Chris Pratt
Shades of "Ruby Sparks" in a romantic comedy about the relationship between a guy and his operating system. The setting's unreal: an affluent, immaculate and apparently crime-free future Los Angeles. The guy's played by Joaquin Phoenix, and like Paul Dano's character in "Ruby Sparks", he's a writer, and things start to get tricky when the supposedly artificial entity he's involved with decides to explore her own rapidly expanding potential. The premise sounds far-fetched, but wait. The next time you're on the train or the bus, check out how many people are riding with their heads down, lost in a world where nothing exists beyond their thumbs and their digital toys. Who knows what they're up to? Maybe it's this. Also, the voice of the operating system is Scarlett Johansson. Maybe a guy could fall for something like that.
