Cornered (1945)

CORNERED  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edward Dmytryk
    Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel,
    Nina Vale, Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler
Powell plays a Canadian Air Force pilot out to track down the fascist responsible for the murder of his French wife during World War Two. A good, tense thriller in which nobody can be trusted. Tough, hard-edged performance by Powell.

CBGB (2013)

CBGB  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Randall Miller
    Alan Rickman, Ashley Greene, Estelle Harris,
    Stana Katic, Malin Ackerman, Mickey Sumner
In 1973, a chronically cash-strapped hustler named Hilly Krystal opened a club in a rat-hole space in the Bowery, with the unlikely ambition of bringing country music to New York City. Country didn't flourish there, but something else did: punk. In fact, what Bill Graham's Fillmore ballrooms had been for the freaks a few years before, Krystal's dank, dingy bar, which he called CBGB, would become for the punks: a symbolic Mecca, a musical and spiritual home. Alan Rickman, looking dumpy and disheveled, plays Krystal in this amiably loose and affectionate character sketch. Young look-alike actors fill in for the Ramones, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, lip-synching the tunes those groups were playing at the time. You don't have to be a big fan of the punk scene to enjoy this one, but it probably wouldn't hurt. Just don't go into the bathroom unless you absolutely have to. And watch out for the dog shit on the floor. 

Screen Test / Take 6

Match the following actors with the movies in which they played opposite Audrey Hepburn:

                           1. Sean Connery
                           2. Humphrey Bogart
                           3. Fred Astaire
                           4. Burt Lancaster
                           5. Albert Finney
                           6. Gregory Peck
                           7. Henry Fonda
                           8. Cary Grant
                           9. Gary Cooper
                         10. Peter O'Toole

                          a. "Two For the Road"
                          b. "How To Steal a Million"
                          c. "War and Peace"
                          d. "Funny Face"
                          e. "The Unforgiven"
                          f. "Charade"
                          g. "Sabrina
                          h. "Robin and Marian"
                          i. "Roman Holiday"
                          j. "Love In the Afternoon"

  Answers:

  1-h / 2-g / 3-d / 4-e / 5-a / 6-i / 7-c / 8-f / 9-j / 10-b

The Big Parade (1925)

THE BIG PARADE  (1925)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: King Vidor
    John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Tom O'Brien,
    Karl Dane, Claire Adams, Hobart Bosworth
John Gilbert in what's widely considered to be his best role, as the pampered son of a wealthy family who goes off to fight in World War One. Claire Adams plays the girl he leaves behind, and Renée Adorée plays the girl he finds in France. The middle third is mostly comedy, some of it surprisingly silly, but then the call to battle comes and the war becomes hell, the Yanks in a line marching forward through the gas and smoke, the machine guns mowing them down, till finally Gilbert finds himself sharing a foxhole and a cigarette with a dying German. By the time he gets home, he's lost a leg and most of his sanity. He's survived the war, but the war won't leave his head, and you wonder whether a reunion with the girl in France will be enough to provide a durable cure. It's the same now as it was then. Even some of the guys who make it back don't make it back.

Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem (2014)

THEODORE BIKEL: IN THE SHOES OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Lollos
This movie is like a diptych, a dual portrait of the author and playwright Sholem Aleichem, who died in 1916, and Theodore Bikel, the actor and folk singer who carried Sholem Aleichem's words and message forward into the 21st century. A lot of the movie is just Theo on a stage, often alone, performing selections from Sholem Aleichem's work, or commenting on the writer's life and career, or his own. He was close to 90 at the time, and seriously ill, but you'd never know that from his performance, which is energized and full of life. Alan Alda narrates, and Bel Kaufman, Gilbert Gottfried, David Krakauer and others weigh in on the crucial role both men played in preserving traditional Jewish culture. An unanswered question hangs over the piece and remains. If Sholem Aleichem carried the instinct for survival and creative expression from the shtetls of Eastern Europe into the early 20th century, and Theo carried those same traditions into the age of computers and smartphones, who will carry them on from here? Somebody always has and somebody always does, but who will follow in the shoes of Theodore Bikel?

Theodore Bikel

(1924-2015)

Kiss Them For Me (1957)

KISS THEM FOR ME  (1957)  ¢ ¢
    D: Stanley Donen
    Cary Grant, Suzy Parker, Jayne Mansfield,
    Ray Walston, Larry Blyden, Leif Ericson
A frantic service comedy and minor Cary Grant vehicle about three Navy pilots trying to enjoy a booze-filled shore leave in San Francisco. This might be the only role Grant ever played for which Tony Curtis would've been better cast. The story's set in 1944, but the look is straight out of the 1950s, and that definitely includes Mariska Hargitay's mother, Jayne Mansfield, a platinum bombshell whose epic curves are her best and only asset. 

Amy (2015)

AMY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Asif Kapadia
The short, messed-up life of Amy Winehouse, a lively, fun-loving girl from North London, whose career trajectory in the early 2000s took her from jazz artist to pop superstar to junkie to corpse, most of it recorded on camera. There's a sense of inevitability about this, partly because you know how the story ends, and partly because it's not clear anybody or anything could've changed the outcome, anyway. Winehouse had demons and a capacity to self-destruct, no doubt. Throw in her apparent exploitation at the hands of her crackhead husband and her suspiciously self-serving dad, together with the crass nature of 21st-century celebrity, and you wonder if she ever even had a chance. "I don't think I'm going to be at all famous," Winehouse says early on. "I don't think I could handle it." She was right, but it came to her anyway, and a witness remembers her talking close to the end about how she'd trade everything just to be able to walk down the street without being hassled. In between, there's the girl with the dynamite voice, playing dress-up in her trademark beehive and mascara, alternately bright and creative or woozy and strung-out, a kid who never got to grow up. She was a tabloid joke in the end, the world's most ruthlessly publicized waste case, and everybody wanted a piece of her. There was no escape. She died in London, July 23, 2011, from the combined effects of bulimia and alcohol. She was 27, the magic number for music legends clocking out young. Amy Winehouse had left the building and joined the club. 

The Last Valley (1970)

THE LAST VALLEY  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Clavell
    Michael Caine, Omar Sharif, Florinda Bolkan,
    Nigel Davenport, Per Oscarsson, Arthur O'Connell
This is like a 17th-century variation on "Survivor", about what happens when a small contingent of soldiers moves into a remote mountain village during the Thirty Years' War. The soldiers, led by Captain Michael Caine, no longer care which side they're fighting on. They just want to be fed. The burgomaster, the town's nominal authority, turns his own mistress over to Caine, rather than risk Caine's wrath. The six local girls picked to keep the troops happy do what they're told without complaining. They know the alternative is worse. Even the parish priest, who in theory answers to somebody higher up, has to do some quick improvising when Caine threatens him with castration in a dispute over a religious shrine. It's an elaborate game of chess in which everybody's a participant, each character watching intently to see how the others are going to move, gauging how the game is playing out, and trying to adjust to any subtle shifts in the balance of power. There aren't any winners, only those who die and those who get to continue to play. The game goes on.

Omar Sharif

(1932-2015)

Nim's Island (2008)

NIM'S ISLAND  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin
    Jodie Foster, Abigail Breslin, Gerard Butler
This is like two movies in one: a kid's adventure story starring Abigail Breslin as an 11-year-old girl living on a tropical island with her best friends Fred the lizard and Selkie the sea lion, and a fish-out-of-water comedy starring Jodie Foster as an agoraphobic writer of adventure novels who sets out on an adventure of her own. Gerard Butler plays both the girl's father and the novelist's fictional hero, and what's interesting about all these characters is the way the plot plays off the parallels between them. Kids, especially young girls, should enjoy the stuff on the island, and Foster, playing a character who's barely functional in the safety of her home and a complete basket case outside it, shows a real knack for physical comedy. 

Georgy Girl (1966)

GEORGY GIRL  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Silvio Narizzano

    Lynn Redgrave, James Mason, Alan Bates,

    Charlotte Rampling, Bill Owen, Claire Kelly

A mod, kitchen-sink comedy starring Redgrave as a big-boned, big-hearted girl who struggles and somehow triumphs, despite her bitch of a flatmate, her bastard of a boyfriend, and the smug, wealthy patron who wants to make her his mistress. Notable for its black-and-white starkness and blithe cynicism. (Charlotte Rampling's approach to motherhood is as funny as it is appalling.) Redgrave's signature role.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Martin Scorsese
    Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie,
    Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner,
    Jon Favreau, Jean Dujardin, Joanna Lumley, 
    Christine Ebersole, Shea Whigham, Katarina Cas
Capitalism goes on a cocaine binge in Martin Scorsese's three-hour buzzfest starring Leo as Jordan Belfort, a real-life stock trader who made and spent an obscene fortune in the '80s and '90s by peddling dreams to fools and pocketing the profits. It's a manic, hellish, jacked-up vision: the American Dream at its most crass and extravagant. Emotionally it's a dead zone, but that kind of fits. Its phone-bank hustlers are rats on a treadmill, and if they've shed their humanity to be where they are, they don't seem to miss it much. They're hooked on the treadmill, and the bigger and faster and higher it goes, the more wired they get.  They're mainlining greed, and the booze and dope and sex (and boats and cars and servants and clothes) are side effects. They love being rats. 

Blonde Venus (1932)

BLONDE VENUS  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Josef von Sternberg
    Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant,
    Dickie Moore, Sidney Toler, Rita La Roy
A rags-to-riches melodrama with Dietrich as a nightclub chanteuse who goes back to work to pay for the medical treatment that can save her husband's life. A great vehicle for Dietrich, which is all that matters, really. If Dietrich in a white tux and top hat doesn't do it for you, there's Dietrich stripping out of a gorilla suit to sing "Hot Voodoo", an image that's as sexy as it is bizarre, and a classic Dietrich moment, for sure. 

Beach Town (2015)

BEACH TOWN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Erik Hammen
    Sarah Winsor, Ahren Buhmann, Riley Neldam
    Kenna Kettrick, William Poole, Alyssa Kay,
    Mel Cafe, Zach Sanders, Maya Briller
This movie is like the cinematic equivalent of hanging out, and I mean that in a really good way. It was shot entirely in Seattle, mostly in Ballard, which really does have a beach in a park called Golden Gardens, and it's as close to plotless as a movie can be that has any kind of story arc at all. It recalls a time when the world was young and so were the people in it, when life revolved around record stores and bike shops and hand-to-mouth jobs and little hole-in-the-wall cinemas and little hole-in-the-wall clubs where you or somebody you knew sometimes played music. And, of course, the beach. It's a kicked-back movie to hang out in, if that's what you're looking to do, happy to wander around on foot, tuned to its own leisurely rhythm and going its own leisurely way. The water in the background in the beach scenes is Puget Sound, which is not exactly tropical, and explains why there are a lot of people chilling out on the sand and not very many people swimming.

Trip With the Teacher (1975)

TRIP WITH THE TEACHER  (1975)  1/2 ¢
    D: Earl Barton
    Zalman King, Brenda Fogarty, Robert Porter,
    Robert Gribbin, Cathy Worthington, Dina Ousley,
    Jill Voight, Susan Russell, Jack Driscoll
Pointless, witless sleaze about a couple of psychotic bikers terrorizing some girls in a mini school bus. It's an exploitation flick, sure, but there's something about the way the movie assaults its female characters, and their crippling passivity, that's repellent. It's not just an insult to women. It's an insult to anybody with a few functioning brain cells. The people who made it clearly didn't give a shit. They got the movie they wanted, and it's a rancid piece of work, all the way up to its stupefying, happy-face ending. Future softcore auteur Zalman King - taking notes, no doubt - plays one of the psychos.