Before I Forget (2009)

BEFORE I FORGET  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jeff Kanew
    Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas at 92, in a one-man show he wrote and performed several years after a debilitating stroke. There's an element of movie-star vanity in this, but it's also a revealing (and not always flattering) self-portrait by a guy who's been acting in films longer than most of us can remember. At an age when a lot of folks are doing well to be breathing, Douglas isn't just still on his feet, he's dancing. He even throws in a little homemade verse now and then, though the odds he'll be named poet laureate any time soon are probably not too good. 

The 2014 Scobie Awards

Picture: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
Actor: Ian McDiarmid, "37 Days"
Actress: Juliette Lewis, "Kelly & Cal"
Supporting Actor: Bill Nighy, "Pride"
Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, "Boyhood"
Ensemble: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
Cameo: Jenny Agutter, 
               "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"
Director: Matthew Warchus, "Pride"
Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto, "The Homesman"
Musical Score: Bill Frisell, "The Great Flood"
Compilation: "Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen"
Foreign Language Film: "A Coffee In Berlin"
B Movie: "3 Days To Kill"
Documentary: "The Square"
Revival: "Northern Lights"
Title Sequence: "Fury"
Trailer: "Rocks In My Pockets"
Print Ad: "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears"
Career Achievement Award: Tom Courtenay

The Night of the Generals (1967)

THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Anatole Litvak
    Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay,
    Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray, Philippe Noiret,
    Joanna Pettet, Coral Browne, Christopher Plummer,
    Gordon Jackson, Harry Andrews, Sabine Sun
The mystery starts with the murder of a prostitute in Warsaw in 1942. There are two clues to the murder: the ghoulish manner of the woman's death - she was stabbed viciously and repeatedly - and a witness who caught a glimpse of a uniform through a crack in a door - the man leaving the scene of the crime was a German general. An intelligence officer (Omar Sharif) quickly identifies three generals whose whereabouts are unaccounted for on the night of the murder, but before his investigation can get anywhere, he's conveniently promoted and transferred to Paris. Two years later, he's still in Paris, and coincidentally, so are all three generals, when another bar girl turns up murdered in exactly the same way as the first one. Can Colonel Sharif solve the case before the Allies retake the city, or will the hooker-stabbing general get away again? The mystery's not much of a mystery after a while, but the narrative holds your interest, raising questions repeatedly about the relative significance of a single murder when mass murder's the order of the day. In fact, the investigation that begins with Sharif in Warsaw survives its original investigator and goes on long after the war.  Most of the Germans are played by Brits. Maurice Jarre's haunting, martial score is one of his best. O'Toole, playing the youngest and maddest of the generals, gives his most rigidly contained (and least expressive) performance.

The Spectacular Now (2013)

THE SPECTACULAR NOW  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Ponsoldt
    Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson,
    Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Young love in all its sweet, naive, intense, despairing, blissed-out, torturous confusion. Add alcohol and stir.

Guns, Girls and Gangsters (1959)

GUNS, GIRLS AND GANGSTERS  (1959)  ¢ ¢
    D: Edward L. Cahn
    Mamie Van Doren, Gerald Mohr, Lee Van Cleef,
    Grant Richards, Elaine Edwards, John Baer, Paul Fix
B-movie bombshell Mamie Van Doren gets involved in an armored-car robbery. Lee Van Cleef plays her convict boyfriend whose escape from San Quentin could gum up the works. Portentous narration keeps you up to date as the story unfolds, and Mamie's mountainous rack figures prominently in the mise-en-scène, reminding you why movies like this got made in the first place. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Wes Anderson
    Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham,
    Jude Law, Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe,
    Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton,
    Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel,
    Mathieu Amalric, Léa Seydoux, Tom Wilkinson,
    Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban
This crackpot, picture-postcard, storybook movie takes place in a quaint, mountainous province in Eastern Europe called Zubrowka. That Zubrowka doesn't exist, has never existed, except as the name of some Polish vodka, is beside the point, or maybe it is the point, whatever. Figuring into the story (in no particular order) are a dead matriarch, a contested will, a priceless painting, a wall safe, a set of brass knuckles, several tiny cakes, a fake mustache, a birthmark in the shape of Mexico, a prison break, war, border guards, guns, romantic poetry, a plate of mush, four severed fingers, a dead cat, perfume, trains, monks' robes, cable cars, a pair of skis, a sled, flirting, true love, fingernail polish, a young man's curiosity, an old man's memory, and the fabled establishment of the title, a once grand luxury hotel. I don't know how else to describe it, really. Wes Anderson wrote and directed the thing, and it's his best movie yet, a movie nobody else could dream up, let alone pull off. There's not a single wrong note, even in the yodeling. 

The 10 Best Movies of 2014

THE TEN BEST:

"The Grand Budapest Hotel"

"Pride"

"37 Days"

"A Coffee In Berlin"

"The Imitation Game"

"The Homesman"

"The Square"

"The Great Flood"

"Lucy"

"The Wipers Times"

TAKE FIVE:

"The Monuments Men"

"Under the Skin"

"Snowpiercer"

"The Theory of Everything"

"A Most Wanted Man"

SECRET TREASURES:

"We Are the Best!"

"In Order of Disappearance"

"Tokyo Waka"

"Kelly & Cal"

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"300: Rise of an Empire"

"Sin City: A Dame To Kill For"

"St. Vincent"

"3 Days To Kill"

BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN:

"Northern Lights"

"Radio Days"

"J'Accuse"

"Pandora's Box"

FOUR FROM THE VIDEO STORE:

"Way Out West"

"The Fairy"

"Act of Violence"

"The Birth of the Tramp"

CATCH IT IF YOU CAN:

"Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen"

Fury (2014)

FURY  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Ayer
    Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman,
    Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal, Jim Parrack
You might think Brad Pitt would've killed enough Nazis in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds", but no. In "Fury" he's at it again, as a battle-weary tank commander blasting his way through Germany in April 1945. Brad and his crew have been fighting the war since North Africa, and they've reached a point where they're not just burned out, they're psychotic. They live to kill. That's their existence. That's what they do. That's all they do. It's a harsh, brutal movie, devoid of the great war/greatest generation heroics we're used to in films about World War Two. There's no "Saving Private Ryan" here. Just slaughter. And more slaughter. And more after that. Which might make it a more accurate depiction of the war. I don't know. It's at least a much less romanticized one. The storytelling is minimal. The carnage is gruesome. There's no comic relief, no catharsis, certainly no glory, and no escape. If "Apocalypse Now" in 1979 was a strung-out vision of war as hallucination, "Fury" is more like an unrelieved nightmare. Enter at your own risk. 

The Time Machine (1960)

THE TIME MACHINE  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: George Pal
    Rod Taylor, Alan Young, Yvette Mimieux,
    Sebastian Cabot, Whit Bissell, Doris Lloyd
Rod Taylor rides a steampunk time machine into the distant future, where a fierce, blue-haired, subterranean race called the Morlocks are keeping a peaceful, blond-haired, surface-dwelling people called the Eloi in passive captivity. The Morlocks with their wild eyes and belligerent manners are more fun to watch than the Eloi, who act like they've been lobotomized, but Yvette Mimieux plays one of the Eloi women, so you can see why Rod Taylor might want to stick around. Escapist storybook sci-fi based on the H.G. Wells novel. Good Ray Harryhausen effects. While you're watching it, see if Rod Taylor doesn't remind you a little of Robin Williams.

Rod Taylor

(1930-2015)

Magic In the Moonlight (2014)

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Simon McBurney,
    Eileen Atkins, Marcia Gay Harden,
    Hamish Linklater, Catherine McCormack
There's a documentary about Woody Allen in which Woody sits on a bed, flipping through some scraps of paper. Each piece of paper contains an idea for a movie, sketched out in a couple of sentences, more ideas for more movies than Allen will (presumably) ever get around to filming. As I was watching "Magic In the Moonlight", it occurred to me that the idea for this movie might've come from one of those scraps of paper. It's about a famous magician (Colin Firth) who travels to the South of France in 1928 to investigate a young medium (Emma Stone) and expose her as a fraud. That sets up a tug of war between logic and magic, as well as the usual Woody Allen reflections on life, death, art, God and the universe, and of course the magician and the medium become attracted to each other, and of course he's older than she is by 20 or 30 years. There's hardly a sympathetic character in the film, though Stone looks so cute in her flapper-era frocks and hats that in her case you don't really care. Marcia Gay Harden is underused as the medium's  mother, and Firth is simply insufferable, making you wonder how the supposedly clairvoyant Stone could fail to detect that he's an asshole, besides being way too fucking old. The white-on-black titles, period music and intellectual posturing are all clues it's a Woody Allen movie, but it's a minor work, one of his prettiest pictures, but one of his weakest scripts.

Manhattan (1979)

MANHATTAN  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy,
    Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne
Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, New York City, Gershwin's music, movies, art, love, sex, infidelity, the meaning of life and an underaged girl. Did I leave anything out?

Final Reel 2014

JUANITA MOORE, 99, actress

"Imitation of Life"

"Women's Prison"

"A Raisin In the Sun"

ALICIA RHETT, 98, actress

"Gone With the Wind"

SAUL ZAENTZ, 92, producer

"Amadeus"

"The English Patient"

"Goya's Ghosts"

KEIKO AWAJI, 80, actress

"Stray Dog"

 "The Blue Beast"

"The Bridges At Toko-Ri"

RUN RUN SHAW, 106, producer

"The Web of Death"

"Stroke of Death"

"Five Fingers of Death"

RUSSELL JOHNSON, 89, actor

"It Came From Outer Space"

"Attack of the Crab Monsters"

"Ma and Pa Kettle At Waikiki"

RUTH ROBINSON, 95, munchkin

"The Wizard of Oz"

PETE SEEGER, 94, musician, activist

"Alice's Restaurant"

"Pete Seeger: The Power of Song"

"Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon"

MAXIMILIAN SCHELL, 83, actor, director

"The Young Lions"

"Judgment At Nuremberg"

"A Bridge Too Far"

ANN CARTER, 77, actress

"The Curse of the Cat People"

"The Two Mrs. Carrolls"

"A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court"

SHÔJI YASUI, 85, actor

"The Burmese Harp"

"Rusty Knife"

"The Heart"

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN 46, actor

"Capote"

"Magnolia"

"Twister"

"Doubt"

GLORIA LEONARD, 73, actress

"Heat Wave"

"Kinkorama"

"Fiona On Fire"

JACQUES BERGERAC, 87, actor

"Gigi"

"Fury of Achilles"

"The Hypnotic Eye"

GABRIEL AXEL, 95, director

"Leila"

"Going For Broke"

"Babette's Feast"

SHIRLEY TEMPLE, 85, actress

"The Little Colonel"

"Fort Apache"

"Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"

SID CAESAR, 91, actor

"Grease"

"The Cheap Detective"

"Silent Movie"
MARC PLATT, 100, actor, dancer
"Oklahoma!"
"Tonight and Every Night"
"Seven Brides For Seven Brothers"
RALPH WAITE, 85, actor
"Cool Hand Luke"
"Five Easy Pieces"
"Sunshine State"
JOHN THOMPSON, 74, ticket taker
Tivoli Theater, St. Louis, Missouri
BIRGITTA VALBERG, 97, actress
"Shame"
"The Virgin Spring"
"Smiles of a Summer Night"

HAROLD RAMIS, 69, actor, writer, director
"Stripes"
"Ghostbusters"
"Groundhog Day"
MARY ANDERSON, 96, actress
"Lifeboat"
"The Song of Bernadette"
"Gone With the Wind"
ALAIN RESNAIS, 91, director
"Wild Grass"
"Last Year At Marienbad"
"Hiroshima, Mon Amour"
WENDY HUGHES, 61, actress
"My Brilliant Career"
"Duet For Four"
"Princess Caraboo"
OSWALD MORRIS, 98, cinematographer
"The Guns of Navarone"
"The Man Who Would Be King"
"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold"

JAMES REBHORN, 65, actor
"Scent of a Woman"
"Cold Mountain"
"Lorenzo's Oil"
PATRICE WYMORE, 87, actress
"Rocky Mountain"
"The Big Trees"
"The Man Behind the Gun"
LORENZO SEMPLE JR., 91, writer
"Three Days of the Condor"
"The Drowning Pool"
"The Parallax View"
JOAN LORRING, 88, actress
"The Verdict"
"Three Strangers"
"The Midnight Man"
MICKEY ROONEY, 93, actor
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
"Quicksand"
"Requiem For a Heavyweight"
"It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World"
DICK SMITH, 92, makeup artist
"The Godfather"
"The Exorcist"
"Little Big Man"
BOB HOSKINS, 71, actor
"Inserts"
"Mona Lisa"
"Last Orders"
"Hollywoodland"
MESACH TAYLOR, 67, actor
"The Howling"
"Mannequin"
"One More Saturday Night"
MALIK BENDJELLOUL, 36, director
"Searching For Sugar Man"
ROSEMARY MURPHY, 89, actress
"To Kill a Mockingbird"
"Any Wednesday"
"40 Carats"
H.R. GIGER, 74, alien designer
"Alien"
GORDON WILLIS, 82, cinematographer
"Klute"
"The Godfather"
"Manhattan"
"Annie Hall"
HERB JEFFRIES, 100, singer, actor
"Calypso Joe"
"Chrome and Hot Leather"
"The Bronze Buckaroo"
ANN B. DAVIS, 88, actress
"Lover Come Back"
"All Hands On Deck"
"The Brady Bunch Movie"
MONA FREEMAN, 87, actress
"The Heiress"
"Streets of Laredo"
"Angel Face"
KEN THORNE, 90, composer
"Hannie Caulder"
"Sinful Davey"
"Superman II"
MARTHA HYER, 89, actress
"Some Came Running"
"The Sons of Katie Elder"
"The Chase"
RUBY DEE, 91, actress
"A Raisin In the Sun"
"The Incident"
"Do the Right Thing"
DICK JONES, 87, actor
"Queen of the Jungle"
"Stella Dallas"
"The Adventures of Mark Twain"
ELI WALLACH, 98, actor
"The Misfits"
"The Magnificent Seven"
"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"
PAUL MAZURSKY, 84, director, writer, actor
"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"
"Harry and Tonto"
"Down and Out In Beverly Hills"
DAVE LEGENO, 50, actor
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (Parts 1 & 2)
GEORGE SLUIZER, 82, director
"The Vanishing"
"Dark Blood"
"The Stone Raft"
ELAINE STRITCH, 89, actress
"Who Killed Teddy Bear"
"The Spiral Staircase"
"Autumn In New York"
BRIAN G. HUTTON, 79, director
"Kelly's Heroes"
"Where Eagles Dare"
"The First Deadly Sin"
JAMES GARNER, 86, actor
"The Great Escape"
"Space Cowboys"
"Murphy's Romance"
JAMES SHIGETA, 81, actor
"Flower Drum Song"
"The Yakuza"
"Lost Horizon"
MARILYN BURNS, 64, actress
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
"Butcher Boys"
"Eaten Alive"
ROBIN WILLIAMS, 63, actor
"Good Will Hunting"
"Dead Poets Society"
"Good Morning, Vietnam"
LAUREN BACALL, 89, actress
"To Have and Have Not"
"Blood Alley"
"The Shootist"
"Dogville"
ARLENE MARTEL, 78, actress
"Chatterbox!"
"Angels From Hell"
"Dracula's Dog"
ED NELSON, 85, actor
"Swamp Women"
"Attack of the Crab Monsters"
"Acapulco Gold"
RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, 90, actor, director
"Gandhi"
"Chaplin"
"The Sand Pebbles"
"The Great Escape"
STEPHAN GIERASCH, 88, actor
"Carrie"
"The Hustler"
"High Plains Drifter"
ANDREW V. MCLAGLEN, 94, director
"Shenandoah"
"Fool's Parade"
"The Sea Wolves"
RICHARD KIEL, 74, actor
"Moonraker"
"The Spy Who Loved Me"
"Pale Rider"
THEODORE J. FLICKER, 84, writer, director
"The Troublemaker"
"Up In the Cellar"
"The President's Analyst"
DONALD SINDEN, 90, actor
"Mogambo"
"The Day of the Jackal"
"The Cruel Sea"
RENÉE ASHERSON, 99, actress
"Theatre of Blood"
"Maniacs On Wheels"
"School For Unclaimed Girls"
SHIRLEY YAMAGUCHI, 94, actress
"Scandal"
"Japanese War Bride"
"House of Bamboo"
GOTTFRIED JOHN, 72, actor
"Fedora"
"Goldeneye"
"The Marriage of Maria Braun"
JAN HOOKS, 57, actress
"Wildcats"
"Coneheads"
"Batman Returns"
GEOFFREY HOLDER, 84, actor, dancer
"Annie"
"Doctor Dolittle"
"Live and Let Die"
AUDREY LONG, 92, actress
"A Game of Death"
"Born To Kill"
"Homicide For Three"
DON KEEFER, 98, actor
"Sleeper"
"Candy Stripe Nurses"
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"
MARIAN SELDES, 86, actress
"Affliction"
"Hollywood Ending"
"The Greatest Story Ever Told"
IKE JONES, 84, actor, producer
"A Man Called Adam"
"A Woman Called Moses"
"Oklahoma City Dolls"
ELIZABETH PEÑA, 55, actress
"Lone Star"
"La Bamba"
"Jacob's Ladder"
"Blue Steel"
ANGUS LENNIE, 84, actor
"The Great Escape"
"633 Squadron"
"Oh! What a Lovely War"
MISTY UPHAM, 32, actress
"Frozen River"
"August: Osage County"
"Expiration Date"
RICHARD SCHAAL, 86, actor
"Slaughterhouse-Five"
"Americathon"
"The Hollywood Knights"
STANLEY CHASE, 87, producer
"Mack the Knife"
"Face of Darkness"
"Colossus: The Forbin Project"
KEN TAKAKURA, 83, actor
"Black Rain"
"47 Ronin"
"Mr. Baseball"
L.M. KIT CARSON, 73, writer, actor
"Paris, Texas"
"The American Dreamer"
"David Holzman's Diary"
MARCIA STRASSMAN, 66, actress
"Another Stakeout"
"Soup For One"
"Honey, I Shrunk the Kids"
MIKE NICHOLS, 83, director
"The Graduate"
"Catch-22"
"Working Girl"
"Closer"
ERNEST KINOY, 89, writer
"Brother John"
"Leadbelly"
"Buck and the Preacher"
FRANK YABLANS, 79, producer, writer
"Mommie Dearest"
"Silver Streak"
"North Dallas Forty"
MARY ANN MOBLEY, 77, actress
"Girl Happy"
"Young Dillinger"
"Harum Scarum"
VIRNA LISI, 78, actress
"Queen Margot"
"Bluebeard"
"How To Murder Your Wife"
JOSEPH SARGENT, 89, director
"MacArthur"
"Colossus: The Forbin Project"
"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three"
BILLIE WHITELAW, 82, actress
"Frenzy"
"The Omen"
"Start the Revolution Without Me"
LUISE RAINER, 104, actress
"The Great Ziegfeld"
"The Good Earth"
"The Emperor's Candlesticks"
EDWARD HERRMANN, 71, actor
"Reds"
"The Purple Rose of Cairo"
"The Aviator"
"The Cat's Meow"

            "These are the best days of our lives. It's
              a terrible thing to know, but I know it."

                                                 Philip Seymour Hoffman
                                                 in "Pirate Radio"

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)

THE ROOSEVELTS: AN INTIMATE HISTORY  
    D: Ken Burns                                   (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
A seven-part, 14-hour documentary miniseries, originally broadcast on PBS, covering a century of American history through the lives of three extraordinary people: Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  First there was Teddy, the Rough Rider, trustbuster, imperialist and conservationist, a political cartoonist's dream and a figure much larger than life. Then Franklin, the jaunty, irrepressible father figure who battled back from polio to lead the country out of the Great Depression and through most of World War Two. And Eleanor, the revolutionary first lady who carved out her own niche as a tireless crusader for social justice, FDR's conscience, confidante and ambassador-at-large to a world his office and paralyzed legs would not allow him to go. It's a worn-out cliché, I know, but in this case to say we'll never see their like again isn't just a guess, it's a certainty. And the film leaves you with a real sense that for these three lives, even under the guiding eye of Ken Burns, 14 hours isn't nearly enough. Paul Giamatti, Edward Herrmann and Meryl Streep do the principal voices. Peter Coyote narrates. 

Edward Herrmann

(1943-2014)