Tokyo Waka (2012)

TOKYO WAKA  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Haptas, Kristine Samuelson
A documentary about crows in Tokyo and the various ways humans have learned to coexist with them. They're smart birds, crows are. Take a look at this movie. You'll see. 

Day Dreams (1922)

DAY DREAMS  (1922)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
    Buster Keaton, Renée Adorée, 
    Joe Keaton, Joe Roberts
Buster Keaton goes to the city to make his fortune and win the hand of the girl he loves. Somehow he ends up being chased by an army of cops, which was about all Keaton needed to make a movie. Lots of other crazy stuff happens, leading up to one of Keaton's most inspired sight gags, in which he gets caught in the paddle wheel of a steamboat, frantically trying to keep up as the boat and the wheel go faster, and faster, and faster. Classic Keaton.

Wild (2014)

WILD  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jean-Marc Vallée
    Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, 
    Michiel Huisman, Gaby Hoffman
Reese Witherspoon plays the cutest woman ever to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. What? You need another reason to watch this movie? You mean there is one?

The Phantom Planet (1961)

THE PHANTOM PLANET  (1961)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Marshall
    Dean Fredericks, Coleen Gray, Francis X. Bushman,
    Dolores Faith, Tony Dexter, Richard Kiel
An American astronaut lands his rocket ship on a wandering planet whose intense gravitational force field has reduced everybody to a height of about four inches. In most ways this is just a dopey, low-budget monster movie (with its own dopey-looking, low-budget monster). But throw in a little "Twilight Zone", a little "Gulliver's Travels", silent star Francis X. Bushman as the planet's stately ruler, and a couple of curvy, early-'60s space babes, and it's, you know, not too bad, for a dopey, low-budget monster movie.

Coleen Gray

(1922-2015)

Frozen Fever (2015)

FROZEN FEVER  (2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee
A seven-minute followup to Disney's 2013 hit, in which Elsa tries to orchestrate a birthday party for her sister and finds that her capacity for freezing everything she comes in contact with can still be a liability. (Having a cold and sneezing a lot doesn't help.) There's a phase little girls go through where they just love princesses, and Disney has never had a problem zeroing in on its target demographic. This was released on the same bill with the studio's live-action "Cinderella", and that's no accident, either. 

Frozen (2013)

FROZEN  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee
A cute animated feature from Disney based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen", about a lonely young woman named Elsa who turns everything she touches to ice. The songs are catchy and the movie won a couple of Oscars, but the storytelling's one-dimensional, a throwback to what Disney was doing 60 or 70 years ago. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but at a time when animators are starting to play to a grownup audience, too, this one's aimed straight at the kiddies.

They Live (1988)

THEY LIVE  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Carpenter
    Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, Peter Jason,
    George "Buck" Flowers, Raymond St. Jacques
A tongue-in-cheek horror movie about a burly construction worker who puts on a pair of special prescription sunglasses and starts to see that half the human race has turned into mindless, soulless zombies whose only function is to serve a pervasive consumer economy. Which is not all that hard to imagine, really. There's a long, long, long, long fistfight in this, and Piper has some memorable one-liners. 

Roddy Piper

(1954-2015)

Force Majeure (2014)

FORCE MAJEURE  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ruben Östlund
    Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, 
    Kristofer Hivju, Fanni Metelius, Vincent Wettergren, 
    Clara Wettergren, Karin Myrenberg, Brady Corbet
This starts out with an apparently happy Swedish family on an idyllic skiing holiday in the French Alps. Tomas and Ebba are fortyish and attractive. Their kids, a boy and a girl, are blond and beautiful. Their first day out, they're having lunch together on the deck of one of those improbable restaurants high in the mountains, when there's an avalanche, which they narrowly escape. After that, fissures begin to appear in Tomas and Ebba's relationship, and as the holiday goes on, the cracks, like what happens when a pebble nicks your windshield, get bigger and deeper and more pervasive and harder to repair. The acting in this is quite good, and the skiing scenes are spectacular. But I found myself wishing the filmmakers could've found a more cinematic way of telling their story than by having the characters sit around and talk it to death. There's an awkwardness to some of those scenes that's real enough to make you uncomfortable, but the emotional stakes are relatively low. Will Tomas and Ebba go on together? It's hard to say. And to tell the truth, it's hard to care. There are a number of points in the last half hour where the movie could've ended, all of them ambiguous, and the ending, when it does come, doesn't resolve much of anything, either.