MEDIUM COOL (1969) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Haskell Wexler
Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz,
Marianna Hill, Peter Boyle, Harold Blankenship
Snapshots of America, 1968. Haskell Wexler's groundbreaking experiment in cinéma vérité ultimately has less to do with its plot - about a hotshot news cameraman played by Robert Forster - than with the social and political landscape in the United Staes in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Some of what seemed topical then looks dated now, but Wexler's technique - interweaving on-the-spot documentary footage with shots of the actors in and around the scenes of the action - creates a sense of immediacy that few other movies from the period can match. Its overriding theme, the pervasive and often mercenary role of the media in contemporary society, hasn't lost any of its impact, either.
Haskell Wexler
(1922-2015)
SPECTRE (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Sam Mendes
Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz,
Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris,
Monica Bellucci, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott,
Rory Kinnear, Jesper Christensen, Stephanie Sigman
The 24th entry in the official James Bond franchise (and the fourth to star Daniel Craig) has 007 taking on a master criminal who's out to control all the intelligence information in the Western World from a giant eavesdropping station in Morocco. The devil's in the details, as they say, and there's quite a bit more to the story than even a two-and-a-half-hour movie can accommodate. Two of Bond's women (Monica Bellucci and Stephanie Sigman) are disposed of much too casually and quickly, and toward the end, when Q (Ben Whishaw) is racing the clock at his computer, feverishly trying to save the world, it almost seems like an afterthought. Not that it matters all that much. The Bond movies are an exercise in style, in which every couple of years a checklist of familiar elements are hauled out, dusted off and given a fresh coat of polish. So there are high-speed chases, impossible stunts, a perfectly tailored wardrobe, a gorgeous female lead (Léa Seydoux), lots of booze, state-of-the-art effects, and a smooth-mannered villain (Christoph Waltz), who will explain his evil scheme in great detail, because he can't help it, and because that's what the villains in Bond movies do. Craig's Bond films to date are like four episodes of one movie, an extended origin story, and this one feels like a wrapping-up, dropping Bond off about where he came in more than 50 years ago. He's squared off against his arch-enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and the conclusion has him back behind the wheel of his cherished Aston Martin. Craig has sent mixed signals about wether he'll return as Bond, but if he doesn't, this wouldn't be a bad note to go out on. He's got nothing more to prove, really. He's made his mark. He's revitalized the franchise. He's given the character a rough edge (and a suggestion of underlying psychosis) he never had before. The license to kill has been in good hands with Craig. He's a great James Bond.
THE KNOCKOUT (1914) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Mack Sennett
Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Minta Durfee,
Charles Avery, Charley Chase, Edward F. Cline,
Billy Gilbert, Edgar Kennedy, Hank Mann
Arbuckle ends up in a prize fight in this Keystone short. A young Charlie Chaplin plays the referee. Interesting bits: Arbuckle breaking down the fourth wall when the camera's about to catch him removing his trousers, and Minta Durfee (Mrs. Arbuckle) in drag.
EXTRAORDINARY TALES (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Raul Garcia
Five Edgar Allan Poe stories, efficiently told with animation and connected by an ongoing graveyard conversation between Poe (as a raven) and Death. Christopher Lee narrates "The Fall of the House of Usher". It was one of the last things he did. Bela Lugosi does "The Tell-Tale Heart". It's a very old recording by Lugosi, and the filmmakers have done nothing to clean up the sound, leaving all the pops and hisses and scratches intact. It's a nice effect. Julian Sands reads "The Facts In the Case of M. Valdemar", in which the character telling the story looks (no accident) like Vincent Price. Guillermo del Toro takes over for "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Masque of the Red Death" is wordless, except for one line, spoken by, appropriately enough, Roger Corman. Poe's concise, morbid tales are ideally suited to Garcia's approach, and the director obviously has a deep appreciation not just for Poe, but for Corman's adaptations from 50 years ago. Edgar himself would like this one, I think.
SOLOMON AND SHEBA (1959) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: King Vidor
Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, George Sanders,
Marisa Pavan, David Farrar, John Crawford,
Finlay Currie, Harry Andrews, José Nieto
Yul Brynner (with hair) plays the king of Israel. Gina Lollobrigida (with curves) plays the queen of Sheba. George Sanders (with a wink and a sneer) plays Solomon's jealous, spiteful brother. There are battles and orgies and passion and betrayal and lust, but what really pisses off that Old Testament God is when Solomon decides to let the queen practice her own religion. (Jehovah would've vetoed the First Amendment, for sure.) Tyrone Power, who started out playing Solomon, inconveniently died of a heart attack early on, so Brynner replaced him. (Apparently that's Power in some of the more distant shots.) I'm pretty sure nobody in history ever looked better after a stoning than Gina does here.
ST. VINCENT (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Theodore Melfi
Bill Murray, Jaeden Lieberher, Melissa McCarthy,
Naomi Watts, Chris O'Dowd, Terrence Howard
Bill Murray plays a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, a disheveled misanthrope named Vincent, who rarely stirs from the reclining lawn chair in his crummy back yard except to go to the track or the bar. He owes money to everybody and his bank account's overdrawn, so when he's asked to babysit the kid next door for $10 or $12 an hour, he reluctantly agrees. The setup's obvious and you know the feel-good payoff is coming, but Murray's crotchety performance undercuts much of the sweetness. It turns out there's more to Vincent than anybody thinks, but like Bruce Dern's character in "Nebraska", he's way beyond the point where he cares, or expects anybody else to. He might have a heart in his chest cavity somewhere, but you'd never hear that from him, and even when Melfi starts plucking at the sentimental strings toward the end, Murray steers clear of them. W.C. Fields would approve.
THE HEART O' THE HILLS (1919) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Sidney A. Franklin
Mary Pickford, Harold Goodwin, Claire McDowell,
Allan Sears, Sam De Grasse, Jack Gilbert
Little Mary plays a Kentucky mountain girl who loses her home when some swindlers steal her daddy's land. A quaint pastoral melodrama with Pickford at her most earnest and obvious. (She was 26, playing a 13-year-old, and the results aren't especially convincing, but nobody at the time wanted "America's Sweetheart" to do anything else.) Highlight: an extended barn-dance sequence where the locals kick up their heels. Lowlight: the part where Mary puts on a sheet and hood and joins a Klan-like gang of night-riding vigilantes. Look for young John Gilbert in an early juvenile role as a lad from the lowlands who has eyes for Mountain Mary.
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jim Jarmusch
Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin,
Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright
A fang-in-cheek reflection on art, immortality and vampirism, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as night creatures who can live pretty much forever, as long as they take reasonable precautions and keep mainlining "the good stuff." They've been around for centuries, but in their current manifestations he's a reclusive rock star working out of a Detroit loft and she's a rock star's wife headquartered in a book-lined flat in Tangier. Her connection there is fellow vampire Kit Marlowe (John Hurt), still moaning about how Shakespeare stole "Hamlet" from him 400 years ago. It's all very droll and deadpan - just what you'd expect a Jim Jarmusch vampire movie to be. Fans of conventional horror will most likely be bored by it, but those who like what Jarmusch does should be amused. Swinton's otherworldly aura makes her a perfect vampire, and Mia Wasikowska is annoying as hell as the kid sister who pays her an unwelcome visit.
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: George Seaton
Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn,
Natalie Wood, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall,
William Frawley, Jerome Cowan, Philip Tonge,
Percy Helton, Thelma Ritter, Jack Albertson
The holiday classic about a department store Santa who claims to be the real thing. Hard-core cynics should stay away from this, but if the U.S. Post Office believes in Santa Claus, we all do, right?
Maureen O'Hara
(1920-2015)
JERSEY BOYS (2014) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Clint Eastwood
John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen,
Christopher Walken, Renée Marino, Michael Lomenda,
Joseph Russo, Lacey Hannan, Barry Livingston
If you were an American teenager in the 1960s, the Four Seasons were almost certainly a part of your high school soundtrack. Clint Eastwood's screen version of the hit Broadway show traces the group's history from the streets of Newark in the late 1950s to their 1990 induction into the Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame. It's kind of a mopey biopic - the guys don't look like they're having fun, even when they're having fun - but there are some inspired bits, like the part where Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) hears some car horns out the window of a city bus, and you realize, at the exact moment he does, that the horns have just played the first three notes of "Sherry", which he will proceed to write, more or less on the spot. (Robert Alda as George Gershwin had a similar epiphany in 1945 in "Rhapsody In Blue".) The highlight has got to be the finale - a curtain call that starts with the boys singing some a cappella doo-wop under a streetlight and builds into a rousing production number in which everybody in the cast takes part. Too bad the rest of the movie couldn't have that much life.
Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe
in "The Long Goodbye" (1973)
Viewers who weren't around then might find it hard to imagine, but in the early 1970s, the hottest (and coolest) actor in movies was Elliott Gould. He'd hit it big with "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969) and "M*A*S*H" (1970), and he was at a career peak in 1973, when he played Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye", Robert Altman's playfully off-kilter take on detective movies. One of the running jokes in the film is the way Marlowe smokes. He smokes everywhere, all the time, lighting his cigarettes with kitchen matches which he strikes on whatever surface he can reach without moving too much. Smoking is Marlowe's way of marking his territory. Sterling Hayden, bellowing up a storm as a boozy writer, calls him "Marlboro". In this scene, Marlowe has just ducked out of a tense but comical confrontation with with some gangsters. It's night, and as he walks out onto the street, he spots the femme fatale (Nina Van Pallandt) driving by in a convertible. He runs after her on foot and chases her for several blocks, dodging the nighttime traffic. The whole time he's running, he's smoking a cigarette. Finally, his luck runs out and a car knocks him down and the girl gets away, and the last thing you see is Marlowe lying unconscious, face-up on the pavement, the cigarette he was smoking still clenched between his lips. I'm sure other actors could've played Marlowe in this, but nobody else at the time could've waltzed through the picture with Gould's slouchy, wise-cracking ease. And the thing he does with the cigarette there - even Bogart would be impressed.
THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Altman
Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden,
Henry Gibson, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton,
David Arkin, David Carradine, Arnold Schwarzenegger
It's 3 a.m. in Los Angeles and all Philip Marlowe wants to do is sleep, but his cat is hungry and he's all out of Courry brand cat food, which is the only kind of cat food his cat will eat. So Marlowe shambles off to the all-night supermarket in search of cat food, plus some brownie mix for the airheads next door, the ones who put the la-la into la-la land. Notice the way Marlowe lights up a smoke as he walks into the supermarket. In this movie, there isn't anywhere Marlowe doesn't smoke. Tragically, the supermarket is all out of Courry brand cat food, and Marlowe's cat knows the difference and runs off. This for sure never happened to Humphrey Bogart, or Dick Powell, or Robert Montgomery, or Robert Mitchum, or James Garner, who all played Marlowe in other films. And it's just the beginning of a shaggy-dog detective story that really kicks in when an old friend of Marlowe's, played by baseball raconteur Jim Bouton, shows up looking drunk and disheveled and asks for a ride to Mexico. There's a countess (Nina Van Pallandt), an alcoholic writer (Sterling Hayden), a quack doctor (Henry Gibson) and a sadistic gangster (Mark Rydell), who could be the twin brother of the punk Roman Polanski played in "Chinatown". Marlowe purists hated this, and probably still do, but it's a loose, funny, throwaway memento from a time when Altman and Gould could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to, and did. Leigh Brackett wrote the script (however much of it wasn't improvised), and the setup's a riff on "The Third Man", right up to the whimsical closing shot. John Williams composed the score, which is really just one song played over and over in every musical style imaginable. Spoiler alert: Marlowe never does get his cat back. I hope that's not revealing too much.
THE ARTIST AND THE MODEL (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Fernando Trueba
Jean Rochefort, Aida Folch, Claudia Cardinale,
Götz Otto, Chus Lampreave, Mateo Deluz
The place is the South of France, somewhere near the Spanish border. The time is World War Two. The artist is an aging sculptor who has run out of ideas and apparently hasn't worked in a while. The model is a young vagrant who turns up in the town square where she catches the eye of the artist's wife, once a much-sought-after model herself. It's a nicely understated character study, photographed in black and white, which effectively captures a sculptor's view of the world, a concentration on line and contour more than color. Jean Rochefort plays the artist. Aida Folch plays the model. Claudia Cardinale plays the artist's wife, who knows exactly what's going on between her husband and the girl whose figure he's trying to capture in clay and stone. As a study in artistic collaboration, it's a useful companion piece to Gilles Bourdos' "Renoir" and Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse".
THE MAGIC BOX (1951) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Boulting
Robert Donat, Maria Schell, Margaret Johnston,
Robert Beatty, Renée Asherson, Leo Genn,
Marius Goring, Stanley Holloway, Michael Hordern,
Sidney James, Glynis Johns, Bessie Love,
Eric Portman, Dennis Price, Laurence Olivier,
Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Basil Sidney,
Ernest Thesiger, Peter Ustinov, Kay Walsh,
Emlyn Williams, Googie Withers, Sybil Thorndyke
The argument over who invented moving pictures usually comes down to the rival claims of France (the Lumière brothers) and the U.S. (Thomas Edison). A third entry in the who-got-there-first sweepstakes is England's William Friese-Greene, who was tinkering with sprocket holes and celluloid in the late 19th century, too. There's some dispute over how practical Friese-Greene's inventions were, but he was definitely onto something. This sympathetic biopic leaves some gaps in Friese-Greene's story, like the time he spent in prison for bankruptcy, but it makes the case for Britain as film's possible birthplace. It's one of the movies Martin Scorsese saw as a kid that inspired him to become a filmmaker.
LUCKY THEM (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Megan Griffiths
Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, Ryan Eggold,
Ahna O'Reilly, Oliver Platt, Nina Arianda, Walter Dalton
Toni Collette plays a music journalist in Seattle, reluctantly assigned to track down her ex, a legendary singer/songwriter who drove off and vanished ten years ago. It's one of those indie flicks that's neither as good as it should be nor as bad as it could be, a noble attempt that always seems to be straining for something it can't quite deliver. What's good is good, though, and that definitely includes Collette as a character who knows she's a little too old for the boy musicians she's still sleeping with, covering her insecurity with an assertive demeanor, a thick layer of cynicism, and an arsenal of tics and mannerisms that women of a certain age would do well to abandon. I saw it in Seattle at the Film Forum on Capitol Hill, and a lot of the movie was filmed around there, some of it just around the corner at the Comet Tavern, which made the viewing experience kind of cool. If you decide to give it a shot, be sure to stick around for a star cameo at the end of the journalist's journey.
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY
D: Charles Lamont (1955) ¢ ¢ 1/2
Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor,
Michael Ansara, Richard Deacon, Kurt Katch
Cross-talking idiots turn up in Egypt, and, of course, there's a mummy involved. Late Abbott and Costello and their last monster-movie spoof. By the end, there are three mummies running around, and one of them's Abbott. A lot of it's more silly than inspired - at their best, A & C were silly and inspired - but the pick-and-shovel routine is classic Abbott and Costello. There's a Three Stooges reference late in the film that's both playful and ironic. The Stooges at that point were on the verge of a late-career resurgence, while Bud and Lou were running out of time.
THE SILENCE (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Baran bo Odar
Sebastian Blomberg, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Katrin Sass,
Burghart Klaussner, Ulrich Thomsen, Anna Lena Klenke
On July 8, 1986, a girl is raped and murdered. Her bicycle and belongings are dumped in a wheat field. Her body is dumped in a nearby lake. More than 20 years later, to the day, another girl goes missing, under what appear to be identical circumstances. The investigation that follows involves (among others) a retired cop who failed to solve the first murder, a colleague who's still at lose ends following the death of his wife, the mother of the original victim, and a witness to the original crime. It's a trip to the dark side for all of them, and if it's not always a model of narrative logic, maybe that's because its characters aren't perfect, either, their flawed perceptions and choices setting up a resolution that's as ironic as it is sobering. Nobody comes out of this unscathed.
THE HATCHET MAN (1932) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: William Wellman
Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Dudley Digges,
Leslie Fenton, Tully Marshall, J. Carrol Naish
A pre-Code oddity starring Edward G. Robinson as an enforcer (a literal "hatchet man") in a tong war. Loretta Young plays his beloved wife, who runs away with a younger man and ends up working as a concubine in an opium den. Robinson doesn't look remotely Chinese, but when he picks up a hatchet, watch out.
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY (2015) ¢ 1/2
D: Sam Taylor-Johnson
Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Jennifer Ehle,
Victor Rasuk, Eloise Mumford, Marcia Gay Harden
With graduation fast approaching, a sweet young college student hooks up with a dour but handsome millionaire who introduces her to his world of cold, gleaming affluence and a wide selection of ropes, cuffs, floggers and riding crops. This is based on a popular erotic novel, and it's another one of those movies where you slog your way through much of its running time waiting to get to the naughty bits. The story has possibilities in the shifting negotiation between a dominant and a submissive over the conditions and rules of the game. The problem is that you never learn enough about these characters for either of them to establish a convincing human identity. The woman at least shows signs of potential, even if some of her choices don't make much sense. The millionaire's just a stick, a charmless control freak with no personality at all. So he's got issues and secrets and a past. Who cares? He's a fucking bore. And speaking of fucking, another problem with "Shades of Grey" is that the sex scenes aren't explicit enough. It's not that you can't figure out what's going on in them. It's that they're what the movie's about, the reason it exists. I can see where caving to the restrictive demands of an R rating might make sense commercially, but this is a piece that pretty much demands an NC-17, or maybe just no rating at all. That wouldn't make it a better movie necessarily. But at least it'd be a more honest one.
$ (1971) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Richard Brooks
Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Gert Frobe,
Scott Brady, Robert Webber, Wolfgang Kieling
Warren Beatty plays a security expert who engineers an elaborate bank robbery and then goes on the run with the loot. So there's a heist and a chase. And a giggly blonde hooker played by Goldie Hawn. And a guy who always wears sunglasses. And a pompous bank president played by Goldfinger himself. And a few trains. And a bunch of safe-deposit keys. And a couple of suitcases. And some baseballs filled with heroin. A slick, diverting caper in which Brooks lets the tension build up slowly and only the people who deserve to be robbed get robbed. Toward the end, it's just Beatty trying to make his escape, on foot, through city streets and tunnels and railroad yards, and out into the country, into the snow - a coincidental reference to "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", released the same year. Quincy Jones composed the pulsing, off-kilter musical score. AKA "Dollars".
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: John Wells
Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper,
Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis,
Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney,
Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham
Portrait of a family coming together and falling apart. Meryl Streep plays Violet Weston, the matriarch, a needy, vicious old woman with a mouth full of cancer and unfiltered profanity. The reason for the get-together is the funeral of Vi's husband Beverly (Sam Shepard), an alcoholic poet who has committed suicide, probably in self-defense. The extended family includes Vi's three daughters, their past, present and would-be partners, her sister and brother-in-law, a nephew and a granddaughter. If sharing an enclosed space with Vi isn't enough to set everybody on edge, it's August and it's hotter than hell in rural Oklahoma. This was based on a play, and a lot of it plays like something crafted for delivery from the stage to the back seats. The actors kind of go with that, most of them, and it works because they're good enough to pull it off. It's like "Nebraska" minus the understatement, another movie about the relationships between adult children and aging parents. But Bruce Dern's character in "Nebraska", beneath all his crotchetyness, was at least recognizably human, a guy who by nature asked nothing from nobody and expected little in return. Streep's character here is the opposite of that. She's a truly horrible person, hiding her vulnerability behind a curtain of bile and cigarette smoke. Nobody escapes her abuse, and her capacity for cruelty is limitless. By the end, the others have all pretty much had it, and one by one they come to the same conclusion: It's better to be without a family than to be part of a family like this.
MR. & MRS. SMITH (1941) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alfred Hitchcock
Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Jack Carson
A Hitchcock comedy about a bickering couple trying to patch things up at a ski resort. The leads are up to it, but the script doesn't give them much. The results are pleasant but slight.
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: James Gunn
Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista,
Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Lee Pace,
Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou,
John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro
At last, a superhero comic-book action movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, an intergalactic adventure in which the heroes bicker and complain and insult each other and generally act like idiots as they race around the universe in search of "the orb," a softball-sized sphere with planet-destroying powers. There are five members of this misfit team. A thief (Chris Pratt) with a fetish for the pop hits of the '70s and '80s. A muscular, scarified giant (Dave Bautista) bent on revenge. A hot-looking, green-skinned warrior babe (Zoe Saldana). A raccoon (Bradley Cooper). And a tree trunk (Vin Diesel). I'm not making this up. It's better if you don't try too hard to figure out who all the other characters are. They're not very well defined, and there are too many of them. The story's like that, too, pretty much, fast and funny and ten times too busy. None of that matters, really. We're not talking about Hector and Achilles and the Trojan War here. We're talking about a make-believe war over a fantasy planet, and a tree trunk and a green-skinned warrior babe and a scene-stealing, wise-guy raccoon. The top money-making movie of 2014.
THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1937 (1936) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Mitchell Leisen
Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen,
Shirley Ross, Ray Milland, Martha Raye,
Bob Burns, Frank Forest, Sam Hearn
Gracie's the owner of a company that manufactures golf balls. Benny's the producer of a radio variety show looking for a sponsor. Shirley Ross plays a girl from the sticks whose vocal skills are a perceived threat to the show's headliner, a crooner managed by agent Ray Milland. The movie's inconsequential, but it's not hard to watch. George (of course) plays Gracie's straight man, but in a movie like this, anybody who's not Gracie is playing Gracie's straight man.
FINAL CUT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (2012)
D: György Pálfi ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
A true labor of love and probably the ultimate compilation movie, telling the story of a relationship through encounters and breakups, jealousy and lust, love and pain and grief and joy and everything in between. It's made up entirely of film clips, hundreds of them, each only a few seconds long, and remarkably the story works, both on its own terms and as a personalized narrative drawn from the moviegoing memory of each individual viewer. Getting to see it in a theater could be tricky. Pálfi secured no clearances for any of the music or images he used, and the movie can only be watched legally in the U.S. on a handful of nonprofit screens. Of course, it's available on YouTube.
THE TRAIL OF '98 (1928) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Clarence Brown
Dolores Del Rio, Ralph Forbes, Harry Carey,
Karl Dane, Tully Marshall, George Cooper
A silent epic in which adventurous characters from all over the map head for the Klondike, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields. Few of them do. The story's secondary to the harsh depiction of life in late-19th-century Alaska. It's enough to make you glad you didn't live there then, but Dolores Del Rio could make anybody reconsider.
A WALK IN THE WOODS (2015) ¢ ¢
D: Ken Kwapis
Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson,
Mary Steenburgen, Kristen Schall, Nick Offerman
Grumpy old men on the Appalachian Trail, from the book by Bill Bryson. Redford originally bought the movie rights hoping to team up with Paul Newman, and there's one scene in particular, involving a narrow rock shelf overlooking a long, steep drop to some water that inevitably recalls "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Another movie this one risks being compared to is "Wild", the one where Reese Witherspoon hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, the differences being that Reese's character was half the age these guys are and hiked twice as far and did it alone. So score one for the lady. Redford and Nick Nolte play Bryson and his ne'er-do-well buddy Katz. As young men they bummed around Europe together, but that was then. They're in their 70s now, and nobody, but especially Bryson's wife (Emma Thompson) thinks the two of them setting off on foot in Georgia and heading for Maine is even close to being a good idea. So off they go. A scene early on suggests the kind of movie this might've been. Katz is bunking at Bryson's house before the trip, and with nobody else around, he slips into Bryson's office. There on the wall and the desk and the shelves are the tokens of a successful, productive life: awards, books, photographs, all well-kept and in order. As Katz takes it all in, the camera closes in on his face, and the visible evidence of years spent boozing, chasing women, knocking around and trying to stay out of jail. Nolte doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to. Everything you need to know about Katz at that moment is in the actor's eyes. Unfortunately, the script and Nolte's growly-bear performance reduce Katz to a cartoon, and it gets a little embarrassing when the boys go into a laundromat and Katz comes on to an obese woman having trouble with her underwear. It's exactly at that point that Bryson, trying to cross a stretch of mud under a freeway, turns into a cartoon character himself, and it's hard not to think you're being short-changed here, that there's got to be more to these two guys and their history than the movie's letting you in on. Nolte played Neal Cassady in a movie years ago, and you can see a little Cassady in Katz (assuming it's even possible to imagine Cassady as an old man). "A Walk In the Woods" has that kind of potential, and the scenery along the trail is undeniably gorgeous. But then you get Nolte in the laundromat, or Redford covered in mud, or the two of them in a bunkhouse gag that could be lifted from Laurel and Hardy: a case of potential diminished by too much cuteness and too many easy laughs.
Actors who were cast or considered
for roles that went to other people:
Bela Lugosi as the Monster
in "Frankenstein"
The role went to Boris Karloff.
George Raft as Sam Spade
in "The Maltese Falcon"
The role went to Humphrey Bogart.
Marlon Brando as T.E. Lawrence
in "Lawrence of Arabia"
The role went to Peter O'Toole.
Robert Redford as Benjamin Braddock
in "The Graduate"
The role went to Dustin Hoffman.
Steve McQueen as Sundance
in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"
The role went to Robert Redford.
Lee Marvin as Pike Bishop
in "The Wild Bunch"
The role went to William Holden.
Frank Sinatra as Inspector Harry Callahan
in "Dirty Harry"
The role went to Clint Eastwood.
Steve McQueen as Kurtz
in "Apocalypse Now"
The role went to Marlon Brando.
Burt Lancaster as Ambrose Bierce
in "Old Gringo"
The role went to Gregory Peck.
Paul Newman as Stephen Katz
in "A Walk In the Woods"
After Newman's death, the role went to Nick Nolte.
THE STAR PACKER (1934) ¢ 1/2
D: Robert N. Bradbury
John Wayne, Verna Hillie,
George Hayes, Yakima Canutt
Sheriff John Wayne and his faithful Indian sidekick Yak ride out after a gang of outlaws under the command of a mysterious figure called the Shadow, who issues his evil instructions from inside a walled safe. Pure shoot-'em-up silliness, but even the Duke had to pay his dues somewhere. The actor playing Yak is the legendary stuntman and second-unit director Yakima Canutt.
10,000 SAINTS (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Asa Butterfield, Ethan Hawke, Hailee Steinfeld,
Emily Mortimer, Julianne Nicholson, Avan Jogia
Here are a few things I took away from "10,000 Saints". Asa Butterfield, at this early stage in his career, looks a lot like a young Bud Cort. Ethan Hawke has become the go-to guy to play charming, irresponsible fathers. And huffing Freon any time, but especially on a cold night in the middle of winter, is a real bad idea. The movie starts out with a couple of teenaged boys (Butterfield and Avan Jogia) kicking around a small town, hanging out and getting high. Then a couple of bad things happen, involving the Freon and an unintended pregnancy, and overnight everything changes and it's time to start to grow up, real fast. Hailee Steinfeld (from "True Grit) plays the pregnant girl. Julianne Nicholson (the "good sister" in "August: Osage County") plays Butterfield's mom. Emily Mortimer (the flower girl in "Hugo") plays Hawke's girlfriend. There's nothing really new going on here, but a cast like that can keep you in the game. Butterfield, who played the lead in "Hugo" at 13, is definitely a young actor to watch. And if anybody out there plans to remake "Brewster McCloud" or "Harold and Maude", you might want to move on that while Asa still looks like a young Bud Cort.
RHAPSODY IN BLUE (1945) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Irving Rapper
Robert Alda, Joan Leslie, Oscar Levant,
Alexis Smith, Charles Coburn, Julie Bishop
Alan Alda's dad, looking vaguely like Liberace minus the glitz, plays George Gershwin in a good-parts-only biography of the great composer. It's the kind of life story where everybody defers to George, the obsessive genius who's driven to create at the expense of everything else. Apparently there were more than a few women in Gershwin's life, but you don't learn much about that side of the story here. He comes off as a workaholic celibate. Gershwin deserves better, in other words, but it's typical of the musical biographies Hollywood was making at the time. Musically it's a medley of Gershwin's greatest hits, with real-life Gershwin associates Paul Whiteman and Oscar Levant playing themselves. Any movie Oscar Levant's in is at least worth watching for Oscar Levant.
Joan Leslie
(1925-2015)
CITIZENFOUR (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Laura Poitras
The strange case of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who spilled the beans on how the government went from spying on possible terrorists to spying on virtually everybody in the years after 9/11. There's a theory of film that says every movie is a documentary about its own making , and that's true of this one more than most. Poitras was in contact with Snowden before the story broke, and she and her camera are in the Hong Kong hotel room when Snowden starts talking and leaking the news. It's not unusual for documentaries to get up close to the people and events they document, but the case of "Citizenfour" is exceptional. Poitras isn't just reporting the story, her participation makes her a player in it, too. She's eavesdropping on history directly, as it occurs, and watching her movie, so are we. Snowden himself remains something of an enigma, a brilliant guy with a conscience who took an enormous personal risk. For somebody who claims he has no skill or expertise at what he and the filmmakers are doing, he's remarkably composed and articulate onscreen. (As he prepares to leave the hotel for a future that's anything but certain, he also looks visibly scared.) What he did was illegal, but was it wrong? We're still wrangling over that one, but in a world where we're all being hacked, it's clear that the rules have changed in a way that's profoundly disturbing. Don't expect the debate to end any time soon.
DAVID COPPERFIELD (1935) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: George Cukor
Freddie Bartholomew, Frank Lawton, W.C. Fields,
Lionel Barrymore, Madge Evans, Roland Young,
Basil Rathbone, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lewis Stone,
Elsa Lanchester, Arthur Treacher, Una O'Connor
The Dickens tale about a boy who has many fateful adventures on the way to becoming a man (and coincidentally a writer much like Charles Dickens). The acting is melodramatic in a way that hasn't been seen since, well, this movie, but Dickens devotee W.C. Fields cuts through all that as the perfect Mr. McCawber.
THE NOVEMBER MAN (2014) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Roger Donaldson
Pierce Brosnan, Olga Kurylenko, Luke Bracey,
Bill Smitrovich, Amilia Terzimehic, Will Patton
My old friend Dr. Sporgersi was the one who first recommended the "November Man" novels to me, years ago. The books are the work of a Chicago newspaperman named Bill Granger, and they're about an American assassin named Devereaux, who works for an entity called "R Section", an outlier of the CIA that specializes in wet work. Devereaux's like a more remote, more cryptic, more elusive James Bond, and when I read on IMDb that Pierce Brosnan was going to play the role in a "November Man" movie, I thought it had real potential. That the finished product is mostly a case of potential unrealized isn't Brosnan's fault. Accent notwithstanding, he's well-cast as the methodical, cold-blooded Devereaux. It's the script, which takes most of the mystery out of the character and most of the intrigue and suspense out of the plot. What you're left with is a formula action flick in which things blow up and guns go off and cars chase each other at high speeds through oddly empty city streets. It's based very loosely on "There Are No Spies", which I remember as the best of Granger's books, the one I couldn't put down, and I guess this is one case where I'd suggest skipping the movie, if you can dig up a copy of the novel instead.
SONS OF THE DESERT (1933) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: William A. Seiter
Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase,
Mae Busch, Dorothy Christy, Lucien Littlefield
Stan and Ollie party it up at a lodge convention in Chicago, after telling their wives they're going to Hawaii for Ollie's health. When the wives learn the truth, the boys are in big trouble. Leonard Maltin considers this Laurel and Hardy's best feature, and it's a prime example of their peculiarly childlike attitude toward women. It's as if their social development in that area had stalled out at around age six, making you wonder how their characters ever could've courted members of the opposite sex. Their primary relationship - completely asexual - is with each other, and the feature film they seem most at home in isn't this one, but "Babes In Toyland", where they literally become characters in a fairy tale. The international organization of Laurel and Hardy enthusiasts takes its name from the title of this movie.
THE BABADOOK (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jennifer Kent
Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall,
Barbara West, Chloe Hurn, Tim Purcell
Here's a movie for anybody who's ever wondered what life might've been like in the Bates home with just Norman and Mother, back when Norman was , like, eight. It's a creepy little thriller from Australia, about a disturbed young boy and his exasperated mom and a book called "The Babadook", which they read together one night before going to bed. The book is like a collaboration between Edward Gorey and Edgar Allan Poe, and it's not the kind of thing a frightened kid should be looking at before going to sleep. The exact nature of the horror in this is never entirely clear, but one thing is: You cannot escape the Babadook. Not that these characters aren't going to try, no matter how crazy or bloody things get. They've made a pact to protect each other, after all. And a boy's best friend is his mother.
THE CONQUERING POWER (1921) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Rex Ingram
Rudolph Valentino, Alice Terry, Ralph Lewis
Rudy plays a French playboy who has to make his way in the world when a miserly uncle cheats him out of his inheritance. Valentino made this on the heels of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", as his career was really taking off. Unfortunately, his character disappears for a big chunk of the movie, and without his presence, something's definitely missing. That wouldn't happen so much in the years and films that followed.
UNDER THE SKIN (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jonathan Glazer
Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams,
Lynsey Taylor Mackay, Dougie McConnell,
Kevin McAlinden, Andrew Gorman, D. Meade
Some trips you go along for the ride more than the destination. Some movies, too. Take this one. Scarlett Johansson, barely recognizable with a blank face and a black wig, plays an alien from somewhere, driving around Scotland in a van and picking up solitary men, who end up in some weird state of suspended animation. You start out not knowing what the hell's going on, and ten minutes in, you're pretty sure you're not going to find out. But you never know where Glazer's going to go with it, either, or what he's going to put on the screen next. That's one reason you're along for the ride. Another is that you keep wondering at what point Scarlett Johansson will take off all her clothes. She does that eventually, but the movie leads up to it gradually, like a slow, episodic striptease, revealing a little at a time. The rest is pretty cryptic, but keep your mind open, while your eyes are on Scarlett, and the ride could be worth it. Try it and see.
GHOSTBUSTERS II (1989) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Ivan Reitman
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver,
Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Rick Moranis,
Annie Potts, Janet Margolin, Harris Yulin,
Peter MacNicol, Ben Stein, Philip Baker Hall
Five years after their epic encounter with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, the Ghostbusters have more or less disbanded. Egon (Harold Ramis) is working in a research lab. Ray and Winston (Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson) are performing at children's parties for snotty kids who couldn't care less. Venkman (Bill Murray) is hosting a transparently fraudulent psychic television show. But evil is afoot, big evil, and when the River of Slime that runs beneath the city breaks to the surface, who ya gonna call? A lot of this is a rehash of the first "Ghostbusters" movie, which means that some of it's pretty funny, and some of it's just big and loud and silly. Murray's as smug as ever, and Sigourney Weaver does not turn into a slobbering dog monster this time around. Also, the Marshmallow Man has been replaced by a tall, green, New York City landmark with a torch and a crown. Maybe you can guess who that is.
THE BLUE ROOM (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Mathieu Amalric
Mathieu Amalric, Léa Drucker, Stéphanie Cléau,
Laurent Poitrenaux, Serge Bozon, Blutch
Mathieu Amalric has watchful eyes, maybe the most watchful eyes in film. It's no accident he wound up with the lead role in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", as a man who's paralyzed and has only one moveable body part to work with - an eye. In "The Blue Room", Amalric plays a farm equipment dealer who has an adulterous affair with the local pharmacist. Through some shifty editing, the movie slips from the two of them talking and making out in bed to a police interrogation. Apparently a crime has been committed and he's a suspect. You don't know what the crime is yet - you eventually find out - but what's interesting, besides trying to work out the key to the puzzle, is to watch Amalric's character, who claims to be innocent, fighting back at first, arguing and combative, and then gradually letting go as he realizes the trap he's in and sees that the more he struggles and resists, the tighter the noose gets around his neck. In the end, he barely speaks or moves at all, and there are only the eyes of a man caught in a trap, betrayed, defeated, watching.
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden,
Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton
C: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Antony Baird,
Judy Kelly, Googie Withers, Sally Ann Howes,
Michael Redgrave, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne
A stranger shows up at an English country house and joins a group of people trading strange stories about dreams they've had and wondering if the dreams could be a warning about some terrible event to come. The stories involve a hearse and a streetcar, a game of hide-and-seek, a mirror and a game of golf. The last one, featuring Michael Redgrave and a ventriloquist's dummy, is the creepiest. Not a bad choice for a dark and stormy night.
FRED WON'T MOVE OUT (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Richard Ledes
Elliott Gould, Fred Melamed, Stephanie Roth Haberle,
Judith Roberts, Mfoniso Udofia, Ariana Altman
Elliott Gould plays the Fred of the title, an old guy still hobbling around the country house he's lived in forever with his wife Susan, who's slipping away in the fog of Alzheimer's. Susan (Judith Roberts) needs more help than she can get at home, even with a full-time caregiver, and their kids have arranged for them both to move into an assisted-living facility in the city. Fred doesn't want to go. What this movie quietly gets right are the everyday details that go with aging, and the tough, real-life decisions faced by elderly parents and their middle-aged children. There's a kind of intimacy about the way the camera moves through the house that makes you feel like an eavesdropper, or a member of the family, letting you know how daunting a stairway can be for somebody on old, wobbly legs, and the agonizing amount of time it can take to maneuver an invalid from a bed in one room to a chair in another. Gould in his 70s seems a little young yet to be playing Fred - you'd like to see what he could do with a role like this in about ten years - but Roberts is unforgettable as a woman who still has flickering moments of joy, but whose cognitive wires no longer connect. Anybody who's had to deal with very old loved ones will find something to relate to in this. Anybody who hasn't but might in the future would do well to watch and take notes.
STILL MINE (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael McGowan
James Cromwell, Genevieve Bujold, Campbell Scott,
Julie Stewart, Rick Roberts, Jonathan Potts
Cromwell and Bujold play Craig and Irene Morrison, an old couple living on a farm in New Brunswick. They're about as happy as two long-married people in their 80s can be, but her memory's starting to slip, and when she takes a fall down the stairs, he decides to build a new house to accommodate her increasing limitations. The movie's about Craig's battle over codes and permits to build his own home, and the couple's struggle to cope as Irene's ability to process and retain information becomes more erratic. It's a heart-wrenching story, told with admirable restraint and exquisitely acted by Bujold and Cromwell. It's no surprise to see Cromwell looking old. He's looked that way more or less forever. But it's a shock (at least for some of us) to see Bujold looking like somebody's grandmother. Where did the time go, anyway?
The Movie Buzzard, who's getting a little long in the beak himself, would watch these women anytime, still.
Sissy Spacek
Sigourney Weaver
Geraldine Chaplin
Genevieve Bujold
Susan Sarandon
Diane Keaton
Julie Christie
Charlotte Rampling
Liv Ullmann
Lily Tomlin
