The Homesman (2014)

THE HOMESMAN  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tommy Lee Jones
    Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer,
    Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Barry Corbin, 
    William Fichtner, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson,
    James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Meryl Streep
There's a pattern emerging in the films of Tommy Lee Jones, one he's been cultivating off and on for years. He likes movies about obsessed characters who go on long, quixotic journeys in the American West. His sense of humor is morbid and his overall outlook is dark. Consider that in both "Lonesome Dove" and "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada", he played men transporting corpses great distances in the wilderness heat. And while that's not quite what he's up to in "The Homesman", his mission is just about as grim. The story begins in a small farming community in Nebraska, where the womenfolk are going mad in a real bad way. It's agreed that three of them need to go to a church in Iowa, where a minister's wife played by Meryl Streep will know what to do with them. The person assigned to get them there is a stubborn, self-reliant spinster named Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), and if you don't think a woman is up to the job, you haven't seen many Hilary Swank movies. Cuddy can't do it alone, though, so she enlists George Briggs, a claim-jumping thief played by Jones, to help out. At the moment they meet, he's about to be hanged. Their relationship will have a terrible symmetry. Mostly bad things happen in this, not to make a point or for any particular reason, but because events play out in a random way sometimes, accidents or just plain carelessness leading to tragedy. Briggs and Cuddy both seem a little crazy, too. She's bossy and inflexible, bluntly proposing marriage to any man who crosses her path. (The men, who are no prizes, invariably dismiss her as plain, which suggests a need for corrective vision, if you ask me.) Briggs is simply and unapologetically beyond redemption. He knows what he is and knows he won't change and knows enough not to pretend. He might show a glimmer of nobility now and then, but not enough to keep him from going to hell, which he'll no doubt do, more or less directly, if he can just get these three wailing lunatics and this bossy old maid to Iowa first. 

It's a Big Country (1951)

IT'S A BIG COUNTRY  (1951)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Vidor, Richard Thorpe, 
    John Sturges, Don Weis, Don Hartman,
    Clarence Brown, William Wellman
    C: William Powell, James Whitmore, Ethel Barrymore,
    George Murphy, Keenan Wynn, S.Z. Sakall,
    Janet Leigh, Gene Kelly, Marjorie Main,
    Keefe Braselle, Gary Cooper, Van Johnson,
    Lewis Stone, Nancy Davis, Frederic March
This is like the movie equivalent of the fourth-grade civics textbook I remember from my time as a kid at St. Bernard's. The textbook predated us - I'm pretty sure it was from the 1940s - and it was definitely a good-parts-only take on American government and culture. It was also, from what I remember, extremely boring. To be fair, the movie isn't nearly as dull as that textbook. It's an anthology of feel-good short pieces designed to shed a patriotic light on the American experience. So William Powell and James Whitmore share a seat on a train and wrangle over the meaning of "E Pluribus Unum." Ethel Barrymore complains about not being counted in the 1950 census. Hungarian farmer's daughter Janet Leigh falls for a Greek ice-cream vendor played by Gene Kelly. Marjorie Main plays the mother of a G.I. killed in Korea. Gary Cooper's a Texas cowboy. Van Johnson's a young minister assigned to a Washington, D.C., church. Future first lady Nancy Davis plays a schoolteacher. There's a documentary segment devoted to black Americans, who do not otherwise appear. Indians are mentioned, but you never see any. No Asians, either, that I recall. Arabs, forget it, not in 1951. The stories are innocuous, but they don't last long, and the actors do what they can with what's there. Coming from Hollywood at the height of the Red Scare, a movie like this has a political context that can't be ignored. It's not just a flag-waving celebration of American greatness. As an implicit response to HUAC and the blacklist, it's an act of self-defense.

Last Days In Vietnam (2014)

LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Rory Kennedy
I found myself wondering, while I was watching this documentary, exactly when the word "clusterfuck" entered the American vocabulary. It'd be hard to come up with a more accurate one-word description of the country's long, botched, murderous military involvement in Vietnam. The movie zeroes in on the tail end of the debacle - the chaotic evacuation of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Most of the witnesses are people who were there - South Vietnamese desperate to escape, and the U.S. officers, embassy guards and helicopter pilots who devised their own black-ops schemes to get as many people out as they could. They're not quite apologists for the cause - the movie's decidedly circumspect about that - but they share a strongly held belief that the evacuation was a catastrophe and that abandoning the Vietnamese who had been our allies was an unforgivable betrayal. It's just one chapter in the story of the war, and Kennedy keeps the focus squarely on people. The stakes are high because the scale is human, and everybody's caught in the clusterfuck.

The V.I.P.s (1963)

THE V.I.P.S  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Anthony Asquith
    Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan,
    Rod Taylor, Maggie Smith, Margaret Rutherford,
    Orson Welles, Elsa Martinelli, Linda Christian
Affluent passengers find their lives and fortunes taking a tumble when a thick London fog leaves them stranded at Heathrow Airport. Richard Burton's married to Elizabeth Taylor, who's running off with Louis Jourdan. Rod Taylor's just sent off a check that could bounce him into prison if he doesn't make it to New York right away. Orson Welles has to be out of the country by midnight, or face the horrifying prospect of (gulp!) paying taxes. Duchess Margaret Rutherford needs an infusion of cash to save her crumbling estate. It's like "Ship of Fools" in the V.I.P lounge, or "Airport" without the disaster-in-the-sky suspense. Apparently the 1% has its troubles, too, just like the rest of us, only their wardrobes are more chic, and their troubles require a lot more dough.

Louis Jourdan

(1919-2015)

Pot au Feu (1965)

POT AU FEU  (1965)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
This movie is made up entirely of shots of people smoking pot, passing joints back and forth, and in the case of one determined woman, trying over and over to roll a doobie that won't immediately fall apart in her hands. You might get the idea watching it that Robert Altman smoked pot, and in fact one of the guys you see toking over a chess board looks suspiciously like Robert Altman.

Kelly & Cal (2014)

KELLY & CAL  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jen McGowan
    Juliette Lewis, Jonny Weston, Josh Hopkins,
    Cybill Shepherd, Lucy Owen, Lusia Strus
What is it about Juliette Lewis? David Thomson goes to some trouble trying to answer that in "The Biographical Dictionary of Film", citing among other things the "Lolita" effect. (Lewis has been acting in movies and apparently living on her own since her early teens.) With her slightly crooked mouth and a yearning, wounded, better-not-fuck-with-me look about her eyes, she's like somebody whose mask doesn't quite fit, who's trying quietly, desperately, and without total success, to keep the demons at bay. Her characters can be reckless and vulnerable and sometimes they make terrible choices. They're not good at hiding their emotions - that imperfect mask again - and sometimes they don't even try. Heading into her 40s, she can't play Lolita anymore, though you sometimes see the girl in her, still. She's a remarkable actress and a bit of an oddity, and she's perfectly cast as Kelly, the bored suburban housewife in "Kelly & Cal". Stuck at home with a six-week-old kid (and not a lot of visible parenting skills), Kelly longs for some genuine human contact, and she's just not getting that from her late-working husband, her suffocating in-laws, or the condescending women she meets in the park. Where she does make a connection is with Cal (Jonny Weston), the crippled high-school senior who lives in the garage next door. Their relationship and its ramifications are the story of the film. Like a lot of indie flicks, this one has some rough spots. The husband's character feels underdeveloped, though Josh Hopkins does a nice job playing him. When Kelly on a whim decides to dye her hair bright blue, it's a little too obvious she's wearing a wig. And toward the end, the whole thing just goes kind of crazy, but maybe that's not so strange when its lead characters are both emotionally fragile and one of them's a teenager. Lewis more or less transcends all that with one of her best roles ever, a performance that touches nerves. You might not always believe the movie. But you always believe Juliette Lewis. 

Safety Last (1923)

SAFETY LAST  (1923)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
    Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, 
    Bill Strothers, Noah Young
Harold Lloyd's affable go-getter moves to the city to make good, but the best he can do is a $15-a-week job as a clerk in a department store. This is the movie where Lloyd scales the wall of the department store building and ends up high above the street, dangling from the hands of a clock. It's a hair-raising stunt, and Harold himself was the stuntman. No other silent star ever did anything quite like it. 

History of Fear (2013)

HISTORY OF FEAR  (2013)  ¢ ¢
    D: Benjamin Naishtat
    Jonathan Da Rosa, Claudia Cantero, Mirella Pascual,
    Tatiana Giménez, Francisco Lumerman, César Bordón
From the beginning in this, there's a sense that something's not right. Power outages. A hole cut in a wire fence. Chaotic violence on a TV newscast. Dogs fighting. Kids who go missing in the night. At first you think maybe the world's gone out of whack. And then you think, maybe not. Maybe it's the people. And the incidents get more disturbing. And they keep piling up. What's going on here, anyway? It's an unsettling premise, the kind of thing that in the hands of another director - Brian De Palma, maybe, or Roman Polanski - could creep you out big time, and you keep waiting for it to go somewhere, anywhere, but it doesn't. It just ends. That's all.

Stolen Face (1952)

STOLEN FACE  (1952)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Terence Fisher
    Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, André Morell
A poor man's "Vertigo", with Paul Henreid as a plastic surgeon who remakes a badly disfigured criminal in the image of the woman he loves. Noir goddess Lizabeth Scott has a dual role as a dishy concert pianist and the party-loving kleptomaniac who winds up with the pianist's face. Some girls you should just walk away from, especially in a movie like this one, but if you're the protagonist in a movie like this one, you can never just walk away. Produced by England's Hammer Films, in the years before horror became the company's specialty.

Lizabeth Scott

(1922-2015)

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

A SCANNER DARKLY  (2006)  ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Linklater
    Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson,
    Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, Melody Chase
Bobby, Woody and Keanu play slackers sharing a house, and Winona plays Keanu's girlfriend, a passive/aggressive nightmare who has a phobia about being touched. Also, one of the guys is a narc trying to track down the source of a drug called Substance D, which turns its users psychotic, and he's hooked on it himself. Linklater adapted this from a novel by Philip K. Dick, and it's all done in rotoscope, an animation process where live-action shots of the actors are transformed into cartoons. Technically, it's kind of cool, but the animation has a distancing effect, and eventually the movie just ends in what feels like the middle of the story. For those who care, it might the closest you'll ever get to seeing Winona Ryder topless on screen. She's rotoscoped, of course, but still.

Dames (1934)

DAMES  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ray Enright
    Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee,
    Ruby Keeler, Hugh Herbert, ZaSu Pitts
Joan Blondell cons Guy Kibbee into financing Dick Powell's Broadway musical, and Busby Berkeley puts 100 chorus girls to work in a kaleidoscopic floor show. Highlight: "I Only Have Eyes For You", which Berkeley turns into a dazzling visual celebration of Ruby Keeler.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Mullan
    Geraldine McEwan, Nora-Jane Noone, Eileen Walsh,
    Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy, Mary Murray
A grim and gripping account of life inside the walls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, where for 100 years the ironically named Sisters of Mercy endeavored to save the souls of wayward girls by working them to death. Anybody familiar with the workings of old-style Catholicism and its dual capacity for cruelty and kindness will know what's going on here, though if you're expecting much in the way of kindness, you should probably look somewhere else. (If you went to a Catholic grade school in the days of the hooded nuns, Geraldine McEwan's Sister Bridget is your worst childhood nightmare come to scary cinematic life.) Mullan stacks the deck some, but he knows his subject and he makes a powerful point. The movie took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival at the same time the Church predictably was condemning it. Not that the Church had anybody else to blame. The brutality and abuse dramatized in the picture were real enough, and the last laundry didn't close till 1996.

Geraldine McEwan

(1932-2015)