A Summer's Tale (1996)

A SUMMER'S TALE  (1996)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Eric Rohmer
    Melvil Poupaud, Amanda Langlet,
    Gwenaëlle Simon, Aurelia Nolin
Ah, to be young and beautiful and in love (or not) in the summer on the seacoast in France. Melvil Poupaud plays the moody protagonist, a math major and would-be songwriter named Gaspard, just out of the university, with a few weeks to kill before he starts his first job. He's got a place to stay - a friend's conveniently vacant apartment - and he's waiting for a girl named Lena to show up. Lena's his girlfriend, or maybe not, he's not sure, but he's hopeful, and she's off in Spain with some friends and she's taking her time getting up to Brittany, and in the meantime, Gaspard strikes up a friendship with a waitress named Margot, and he and Margot take long walks together and flirt a little and exchange confidences and kind of hit it off. Then he meets Solene, who's lively and outgoing and can sing, and Gaspard takes the song he was writing for Lena and gives it to her. Then Lena turns up and wants to know how that song's coming along, and now he's got three girls on his hands, which is two girls too many, but what's an introspective, indecisive, cynical, moonstruck guy to do? In fact, all three women are playing him, but probably no more than he's playing them, or trying to. In the end, the best he can do is call it a summer and make his escape. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, and at the same time not enough. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. It's a cautionary tale.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (2014)

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez
    Mickey Rourke, Josh Brolin, Eva Green, 
    Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jessica Alba, Powers Booth,
    Rosario Dawson, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liotta,
    Christopher Lloyd, Juno Temple, Bruce Willis
Miller and Rodriguez return to the scene of the crime - a lot of crime - with a sequel to their hard-boiled hit from 2005. Mickey Rourke reprises his role as Marv, a bullet-headed brute whose heart's in the right place, or it would be, if he had one. Josh Brolin plays the tough-guy protagonist who can never say no to a dame, especially when the dame is Eva Green. Jessica Alba plays a stripper in a sleazy club where the strippers don't really strip, but the boozed-up men down below get jacked watching them anyway. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a gambler who gets in over his head, and both he and Alba have a score to settle with a nasty piece of work called the Senator (Powers Booth, who practically breathes graphic-novel villainy). Bruce Willis turns up as Alba's ghostly guardian angel. Some of the characters are new, but it all kind of feels recycled. The narrative setup is noir by the numbers, and the equation's a mess. The visuals still look good, and as before, mayhem abounds, with a particular emphasis on severed heads and gouged-out eyes. This time around, the directors seem to have blown most of their color budget on Eva Green's lips and eyes. If that's the case, it was money well spent, a testament to Green's status as the screen's reigning viper, an actress who can make marginal pulp worth watching, and a femme fatale who's undeniably both femme and fatale.

Witness For the Prosecution (1957)

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich,
    Elsa Lanchester, Henry Daniell, Una O'Connor
Billy Wilder's adaptation of an Agatha Christie play about a cranky old barrister who agrees to argue for the defense in a particularly difficult murder case. A whodunit delivered with plenty of wit and a satisfying twist or two at the end. Laughton as the barrister and Lanchester as his badgering nurse play off each other with the combative affection of an old married couple, which, in fact, they were.

The Wipers Times (2013)

THE WIPERS TIMES  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andy De Emmony
    Ben Chaplin, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Steve Oram,
    Michael Palin, Ben Daniels, Josh O'Connor,
    Jarrod Cooke, Colm Ash, Hugh Skinner
British troops dodging bullets in Belgium and France during the Great War uncover a printing press and use it to publish their own satirical trench newspaper. A case study in narrative compression, a 90-minute movie in which nothing seems wasted and puns and jokes punctuate the script the way artillery fire punctuates the background soundtrack. That's no accident, and in fact, it's a big part of what the movie's about: the way humor in any form helps keep men in battle from going insane. Michael Palin's well cast as a sympathetic general who (unlike some of his junior officers) both reads the paper and gets the joke. Produced for British television. 

The Hurricane (1937)

THE HURRICANE  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Ford
    Dorothy Lamour, Jon Hall, Raymond Massey,
    Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, Thomas Mitchell,
    Al Kikume, John Carradine, Movita Castenada
If this isn't the original special-effects disaster movie, it's at least a prototype, about what happens to a tropical island and its inhabitants when a devastating storm blows in. Raymond Massey plays the inflexible colonial governor. Mary Astor's his sympathetic wife. Dorothy Lamour (of course) plays a native girl married to dashing island hunk Jon Hall. Thomas Mitchell's a rum-soaked doctor and John Carradine's the sadistic warden of the prison where Hall ends up incarcerated. Which is more than you really need to know, because what it all leads up to is that killer storm, which pretty much wrecks everything that stands in its path. The storm is awesome, and this was long before you could fake it with digital imaging. It's real wind (created using airplane propellers) and real water (a lot of it). It's one of the movies my dad remembers seeing as a kid. It's not the kind of movie a kid back then would forget. 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 1 
    D: Francis Lawrence                              (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth,
    Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman,
    Woody Harrelson, Julianne Moore, Elizabeth Banks,
    Willow Shields, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci
In the first half of episode three in the Katniss Everdeen saga, the games are over, District 12 lies in ruins, the other districts are rebelling, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) clings to power through intimidation and mass murder, and Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) becomes the face of the revolution. Like the previous "Hunger Games" films, it's an action romance for young adults, but now the stakes are higher. The outcome this time will affect everybody. The outcome will have to wait, of course, for "Mockingjay - Part 2", when everything presumably will be resolved. Will Katniss triumph? Will Snow be deposed? Will Katniss finally hook up with the tormented Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), or the hunky Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth)? Will Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) be reunited with her trash-queen wardrobe? Will Prohibition be lifted, so that Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) can get a real drink? I told you the stakes were high. Stay tuned.

Gimme Shelter (1970)

GIMME SHELTER  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
On December 6, 1969, barely three months after Woodstock, the Rolling Stones wrapped up a North American tour with a free outdoor concert at a racetrack in Northern California. A good time was not had by all, and Altamont quickly became a cultural metaphor marking the end of the 1960s. People on various drugs freaked out. The Hell's Angels, hired to provide security around the stage, drank a lot of beer and beat people unconscious with pool cues. Finally, during the Stones' set, a black man in a green suit apparently pulled a gun and was stabbed to death by one of the Angels. Remarkably, this documentary captures it all on film, together with uneasy closeups of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts self-consciously watching the replay and responding to it. (Keith Richards is around, too, but looks too zoned out to respond to anything.) Young George Lucas was one of the cameramen.

Albert Maysles

(1926-2015)

Zombie Women of Satan (2009)

ZOMBIE WOMEN OF SATAN  (2009)  ¢
    D: Steve O'Brien, Warren Speed
    Warren Speed, Victoria Hopkins, Victoria Broom,
    Seymour Mace, Marysia Kay, Peter Bonner,
    Kate Soulsby, Gillian Settle, Joe Nicholson
Lots of boobs and blood in a moronic schlockfest from Britain, about what happens when zombies in lingerie meet up with the members of a deranged circus. Thanks to digital technology, the kinds of people who used to introduce really bad horror movies on late-night TV, or just watch them, can now make their own really bad horror movies and show them on DVD or YouTube. It's not an improvement, even with the boobs and blood.

Lili (1953)

LILI  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Charles Walters
    Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Jean-Pierre Aumont,
    Zsa Zsa Gabor, Amanda Blake, Kurt Kasznar
A Technicolor confection from MGM, starring Leslie Caron as an orphan girl who joins a traveling carnival, where she falls for a charming magician and goes to work for a surly puppeteer. The "Oz"-like dancing dream sequence is a highlight, and the puppets have more life in them than some actors do. The Bronislau Kaper-Helen Deutsch song "Hi Lili, Hi Lo" won an Academy Award.

Flashback: "Under the Skin"

   I read an interview with Burt Lancaster years ago, and he said something in it that stuck with me. I couldn't quote it exactly now, but it was something to the effect that he was 65 years old and he could still be turned on by the charms of a 19-year-old girl. He added that if that made him a dirty old man, so be it. 
    I'm a couple years older than Burt was then, and in the interest of full disclosure, I can relate, at least when I go to the movies. And I suspect that what Burt said is true of more men than will ever admit it. 
    It's something I thought about last year, after watching the Scarlett Johansson movie "Under the Skin". In the movie, Scarlett plays a mysterious alien who comes on to a series of men and seduces them. One of the things that's interesting about the way the movie plays out is that as she goes from one encounter to the next, the scenes become incrementally more graphic, revealing a little more of Scarlett each time. And I've got to admit that watching Scarlett Johansson get naked on the installment plan didn't bother me a bit. Does that make me a dirty old man? Sure. I guess. Maybe. Am I the only one out there? Not a chance.
    I haven't seen every movie Scarlett Johansson's been in, but I think this might be the first time she's appeared completely nude on screen. It's all very discreet - "artistic," some would say - but, still, there she is, no body double, or anything. And countering the trend toward anorexic actresses who look like skeletons with skin stretched over them, Scarlett has real curves. They look good on her, too. I think there's something reassuring about that. 
    I couldn't say whether women respond the same way to naked men. The pornography industry, which is huge, certainly  caters a lot more to men looking at women. It always has. And if there was a buck to be made going the other way, you can bet more X-rated auteurs would be cashing in. On the other hand, there's a reason for Matthew McConaughey's periodic shirt removals, as there was for Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman and Clark Gable before him. And I know a few women (of a certain age) who probably wouldn't look away from an "artistically" lit nude scene, if the featured player in it was Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. 
    The point, I guess, is that we're all sexual (at least most of us are), and movies are a voyeuristic medium. We're all out there watching, and every time the lights go down, or the DVD kicks in, or we hit "play" on the remote or the keyboard, we're looking in some way - emotional, intellectual, visceral - to be stimulated, to be turned on. 
    Scarlett Johansson in "Under the Skin" works for me, but face it. We're all voyeurs, and only some of us are dirty old men. 

Panic Room (2002)

PANIC ROOM  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Fincher
    Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker,
    Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam, Patrick Bauchau
"Wait Until Dark" for the new millennium, about a woman and her daughter who move into a Manhattan mausoleum the size of San Simeon, where they're terrorized by intruders on the their first night in the house. Suspension of disbelief could be difficult for some, but fans of escapist suspense, eye-catching camerawork, or Jodie in a tank top aren't likely to care about that. The first entry in Foster's unofficial commando trilogy, followed by "Flightplan" three years later and "The Brave One" in 2007.

The World's Greatest Sinner (1962)

THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER  (1962)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Timothy Carey
    Timothy Carey, Gil Barreto, 
    Betty Rowland, James Farley
Longtime character actor and weapons-grade eccentric Timothy Carey wrote, produced, directed, distributed and starred in this proto-indie experiment about an insurance salesman who decides to reinvent himself as God. If it's not one of the worst movies ever made - and it might be - it's at least one of the craziest, but give Carey credit for not wasting his one shot at being an auteur. If nothing else, it's uncompromising, a work that practically defines the border between artistic ambition and madness. A young Frank Zappa, billed in the credits simply as "Zappa", composed the musical score. 

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: J.J. Abrams
    Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch,
    Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho,
    Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, Chris Hemsworth,
    Peter Weller, Heather Langenkamp, Leonard Nimoy
Kirk, Spock and the crew of the Starship Enterprise boldly go into Klingon Territory to take out a rogue Starfleet officer who's been using his exceptional intellectual powers for nefarious ends. Benedict Cumberbatch (TV's "Sherlock") plays the villain, and he's a good one (or a bad one, depending on how you look at it, I guess). The accent's on action this time around, but it's a respectable outing for the new old "Star Trek" gang, and Leonard Nimoy's cameo marks the final trip to the final frontier for the original Mr. Spock.

Leonard Nimoy

(1931-2015)