Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954/1956)

GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS  (1954/1956) 
    D: Ishiro Honda, Terry Morse                                     ¢ ¢ ¢
    Raymond Burr, Takashi Shimura,
    Momoko Kôchi, Akira Takarada
The original Japanese special-effects monster movie, in which a miniature Tokyo is ravaged by a giant reptile played by a man in a rubber suit. Toy helicopters tip over, toy cars are crushed, toy buildings catch fire and toy tanks are deployed, but nothing can stop Godzilla. It's Armageddon, I tell ya. The retooled U.S. version has Raymond Burr in a framing story as a foreign journalist who witnesses the carnage. If the world has learned one thing since the 1950s, it's that it takes more than heavy-duty weapons and a massive dose of electricity to kill Godzilla. An oxygen destroyer, though, that might work. Followed (of course) by umpteen remakes and sequels, some of them with ridiculously inflated budgets. Godzilla's not Godzilla if he's not being played by a man in a rubber suit. 

Nanny McPhee Returns (2010)

NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Susannah White
    Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans,
    Maggie Smith, Asa Butterfield, Ralph Fiennes,
    Ewan McGregor, Sam Kelly, Rosie Taylor-Ritson
Unruly children beware.

Our Modern Maidens (1929)

OUR MODERN MAIDENS  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jack Conway
    Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Rod La Rocque,
    Anita Page, Josephine Dunn, Edward Nugent
Crawford and Fairbanks play jazz babies engaged to be married. Complications crop up on the way to the altar. The follow-up to Crawford's star-making vehicle, "Our Dancing Daughters", with Joan perfectly cast as a girl who's willing to trade what she's got to get what she wants, making up in brashness and pizzazz what she lacks in technique. Crawford and Fairbanks were a couple in real life when they made this. 

Lucy (2014)

LUCY  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Luc Besson
    Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, 
    Min-Sik Choi, Amr Waked
Luc Besson seems to favor extreme makeovers in his female protagonists: Anne Parillaud in "La Femme Nikita", Milla Jovovich in "The Messenger", Scarlett Johansson in this. In Scarlett's case, the transformation is cerebral. She plays a student living in Taipei, who through some real bad luck (and a horrible choice in boyfriends) becomes a mule for a drug cartel. When the packet sewn into her abdomen breaks open before it can be removed, the drug hits her brain like a bullet, and her ability to process and use information increases exponentially. (It might be noted that whether she's working with 10 percent of her mind's capacity or 90, Scarlett's demeanor never changes. Her remoteness stays constant throughout.) Besson, meanwhile, uses the fantasy/action-movie premise to explore what a rapidly exploding I.Q. might look like, from inside and outside the subject's cranium. It might be more visual escape than cognitive science, but what he comes up with is vividly imagined and wonderfully strange. The Lucy from whom they say we all descend even makes an appearance. 

Northern Lights (1979)

NORTHERN LIGHTS  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson
    Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano,
    Henry Martinson, Marianne Astrom-DeFina
A movie you've probably never heard of, about a chapter in American history some folks on the Right would just as soon you didn't find out about, ever. The place is rural North Dakota. The year is 1915. Banks are foreclosing, railroads are raising their rates, grain prices are falling, and organizers are traveling the state in jalopies, trying to drum up support for the Nonpartisan League, pitching the radical idea that if the people who work the land band together, they just might stay alive and in business. It's a spare, passionate, uncompromising movie, shot on location in black and white. Most of the supporting roles are played by non-actors who look like the real thing. The living conditions it depicts are rough, and the working conditions are brutal. The threshing scene, in which a bunch of farmers team up to save a neighbor's crop in the middle of a blizzard, looks authentic enough to give you frostbite. There's a lot of "Days of Heaven" in this, but none of Terrence Malick's romanticized, pastoral beauty. And a lot of John Steinbeck. It's a movie no Hollywood studio would go near, much less know how to pull off. Imagine. A socialist masterpiece. 

American Sniper (2014)

AMERICAN SNIPER  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner
Clint Eastwood's controversial Iraq War movie tracks the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle from small-town Texas through four combat tours, during which he became the deadliest sharpshooter in U.S. military history. The Iraq sequences, filmed in Morocco, are undeniably intense, in a league with "The Hurt Locker", and another testament to Eastwood's seemingly effortless skill as a filmmaker. There's no character development beyond Bradley Cooper's Oscar-nominated performance as Kyle. Even Sienna Miller, who's very good as Kyle's wife, is stuck playing a role that's mostly a cliché. While attention to the politics of the war is minimal, there's an implied connection between 9/11 and Iraq that some might find misleading, if not disturbing. The Iraqis are repeatedly dismissed as "savages," and Kyle's stated justification for the war (and his own participation) is the old Cold War mantra that if we don't fight them over there, we'll be fighting them in San Diego. Conspicuously missing is any recognition that the "savages" might view themselves as patriots defending their own land against an invading army, and that for them, it is San Diego.

Level Five (1997)

LEVEL FIVE  (1997)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Chris Marker
    Catherine Belkhodja, Kenji Tokitsu, Kinjo Shigeaki
Chris Marker, who died in 2012 at 91, once made a movie ("La Jetée") from nothing but still images, so you know the guy didn't mind working outside the box. He's definitely doing that here, with a story that combines a video game with the Battle of Okinawa toward the end of World War Two. It's an ambitious but very uneven piece of work, part documentary, part psychedelic eyeshow, part philosophical speculation delivered straight into the camera in tight closeup by the actress Catherine Belkhodja. Belkhodja plays a character called Laura - at least that's one of her names - and she's the one playing the game, or maybe she's creating it, I'm not sure, trying (like Marker) to expand and defy the rules, to find out if, by controlling the outcome of the game, she can change history. The Okinawa footage is arresting enough to make you want to know more about the battle. (It was horrific.) The psychedelic stuff could make you wonder what the movie might look like if mind-altering substances were involved. (I watched it without them.) The closeup scenes with Belkhodja hold your attention for a while - Belkhodja is not hard to look at - but lost me completely about the time her character starts to engage in a two-way conversation with a stuffed parrot. It's the only time in the movie you see her smile, but she's pretty detached from the game at that point, and an awful long way from Okinawa.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Christophe Gans
    Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Émilie Dequenne,
    Monica Bellucci, Jérémie Renier, Mark Dacascos
Try to imagine the pitch for this. It's a historical romance/costume adventure, see, with a monster and martial arts. The heroes are these two guys with long hair and three-cornered hats and these real cool-looking long leather coats, and one of them's this dashing explorer/doctor/gardener/libertine/naturalist/taxidermist type, and the other's some kind of Iroquois/Mohawk Indian, the only survivor from his tribe (think "Last of the Mohicans"), so you got this colonial thing going, only the movie's not set in the colonies, it's back in France, before the Revolution, and it's in French, which means in the States it'll have subtitles, but that won't matter, because Americans, you know, as long as you got a lot of guys beating the shit out of each other, they're not going to care what anybody's talking about anyway. The monster's this giant, hideous wolf, see, only it's really a wolf in a spiky leather harness that looks pretty fakey the closer you get to it, so we don't get up close with the monster till the third hour, at least. Did I say it was going to be long? It's going to be long. So the wolf goes around killing people and these different army units and gangs of peasants go after the wolf, and there's a lot of slow motion/fast motion/freeze frame stuff, especially with all the bone-crunching kung fu kicking and killing going on, and there's this evil cult and a guy with one arm who makes his own silver bullets and a prostitute on a mission from the pope, and people die, but only some of them come back to life, and by the end even the most brain-fried stoner out there will know that none of it makes much sense, but by then it'll be too late to ask for their money back and we're home free. Whaddya think?

Dead Pigeon On Beethoven Street (1972)

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET 
    D: Samuel Fuller                      (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Stéphane Audran,
    Anton Diffring, Eric P. Caspar, Sieghardt Rupp
The first thing about this movie, it's got a great title. The second thing, it's a Sam Fuller movie, so you can take the title literally. It's vintage Fuller, a demented pulp thriller about an American private eye in Germany trying to crack a photo blackmail ring. It plays like a Raymond Chandler story shot in a carnival fun house, but Philip Marlowe never had to dodge bullets in a maternity ward while taking on a gangster named Charlie Umlaut.

Quote File / Take 6

"I'm not afraid of death. I'm an old physicist. I'm 
  afraid of time."
  Michael Caine
  in "Interstellar"

"I'm just a pilgrim on the path of least resistance."
  Jack Benny
  in "The Big Broadcast of 1937"

"I am a nymphomaniac and I love myself for being 
  one."
  Charlotte Gainsbourg
  in "Nymphomaniac"

"I'm a warrior, an assassin. I don't dance."
  Zoe Saldana
  in "Guardians of the Galaxy"

"I worked at Disneyland. I was one of the rides."
  Julie Strain
  in "Day of the Warrior"

Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel
This would make a good companion piece to "Searching For Sugar Man", another documentary detective story about the quest to track down an artist whose self-imposed obscurity seems at odds with the astonishing quality of the artist's work. Vivian Maier worked for 40 years as a nanny, and for all of that time roamed the streets with a Rolleiflex camera, shooting what she saw. She took more than 100,000 pictures, in slums and stockyards, in New York and Chicago and around the world, often with her underaged charges (and occasional subjects) in tow. Her negatives turned up in boxes which were auctioned off when the money ran out to pay storage costs, and that's how she came to the attention of John Maloof, who bought some of them and became obsessed with finding out who took all those photographs. There's no last-act happy ending here, at least not for Vivian Maier, who died at 83, impoverished and mentally ill, in 2009. At the same time, you wonder whether in some way she got what she wanted. She knew her work was good, and she went to some trouble, as long as she was able, to insure its survival. Her compulsion was with making art, not showing or selling it. She never shared her pictures with anybody, and many of them she never saw herself. That they're being recognized and celebrated only after her death isn't necessarily a tragedy, and could be just the opposite. Brilliant, eccentric and willfully reclusive, Vivian Maier might not want it any other way.

International House (1933)

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: A. Edward Sutherland
    W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen,
    Bela Lugosi, Franklin Pangborn, Stuart Irwin,
    Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway,
    Sterling Holloway, Lumsden Hare, Baby Rose Marie
Potential buyers from around the world gather at a luxury hotel in Wuhu, China, to bid on a new invention that looks a lot like a prototype of television. That sets up a series of vintage, pre-Code comedy sketches and musical acts. So Franklin Pangborn fusses about, W.C. Fields imbibes, Peggy Hopkins Joyce hunts for a husband, and Gracie Allen drives everybody around her crazy. Meanwhile, Baby Rose Marie belts out a blues number, Cab Calloway sprints through a hopped-up rendition of "Reefer Man", and Sterling Holloway does a loose-limbed dance routine backed by 40 chorus girls. Fields more or less takes over, once he and his beer bottles touch down in Wuhu, but even he has to take a step back when he shares the screen with Gracie.