MEDIUM COOL (1969) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Haskell Wexler
Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz,
Marianna Hill, Peter Boyle, Harold Blankenship
Snapshots of America, 1968. Haskell Wexler's groundbreaking experiment in cinéma vérité ultimately has less to do with its plot - about a hotshot news cameraman played by Robert Forster - than with the social and political landscape in the United Staes in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Some of what seemed topical then looks dated now, but Wexler's technique - interweaving on-the-spot documentary footage with shots of the actors in and around the scenes of the action - creates a sense of immediacy that few other movies from the period can match. Its overriding theme, the pervasive and often mercenary role of the media in contemporary society, hasn't lost any of its impact, either.
Haskell Wexler
(1922-2015)
SPECTRE (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Sam Mendes
Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz,
Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris,
Monica Bellucci, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott,
Rory Kinnear, Jesper Christensen, Stephanie Sigman
The 24th entry in the official James Bond franchise (and the fourth to star Daniel Craig) has 007 taking on a master criminal who's out to control all the intelligence information in the Western World from a giant eavesdropping station in Morocco. The devil's in the details, as they say, and there's quite a bit more to the story than even a two-and-a-half-hour movie can accommodate. Two of Bond's women (Monica Bellucci and Stephanie Sigman) are disposed of much too casually and quickly, and toward the end, when Q (Ben Whishaw) is racing the clock at his computer, feverishly trying to save the world, it almost seems like an afterthought. Not that it matters all that much. The Bond movies are an exercise in style, in which every couple of years a checklist of familiar elements are hauled out, dusted off and given a fresh coat of polish. So there are high-speed chases, impossible stunts, a perfectly tailored wardrobe, a gorgeous female lead (Léa Seydoux), lots of booze, state-of-the-art effects, and a smooth-mannered villain (Christoph Waltz), who will explain his evil scheme in great detail, because he can't help it, and because that's what the villains in Bond movies do. Craig's Bond films to date are like four episodes of one movie, an extended origin story, and this one feels like a wrapping-up, dropping Bond off about where he came in more than 50 years ago. He's squared off against his arch-enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and the conclusion has him back behind the wheel of his cherished Aston Martin. Craig has sent mixed signals about wether he'll return as Bond, but if he doesn't, this wouldn't be a bad note to go out on. He's got nothing more to prove, really. He's made his mark. He's revitalized the franchise. He's given the character a rough edge (and a suggestion of underlying psychosis) he never had before. The license to kill has been in good hands with Craig. He's a great James Bond.
THE KNOCKOUT (1914) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Mack Sennett
Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Minta Durfee,
Charles Avery, Charley Chase, Edward F. Cline,
Billy Gilbert, Edgar Kennedy, Hank Mann
Arbuckle ends up in a prize fight in this Keystone short. A young Charlie Chaplin plays the referee. Interesting bits: Arbuckle breaking down the fourth wall when the camera's about to catch him removing his trousers, and Minta Durfee (Mrs. Arbuckle) in drag.
EXTRAORDINARY TALES (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Raul Garcia
Five Edgar Allan Poe stories, efficiently told with animation and connected by an ongoing graveyard conversation between Poe (as a raven) and Death. Christopher Lee narrates "The Fall of the House of Usher". It was one of the last things he did. Bela Lugosi does "The Tell-Tale Heart". It's a very old recording by Lugosi, and the filmmakers have done nothing to clean up the sound, leaving all the pops and hisses and scratches intact. It's a nice effect. Julian Sands reads "The Facts In the Case of M. Valdemar", in which the character telling the story looks (no accident) like Vincent Price. Guillermo del Toro takes over for "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Masque of the Red Death" is wordless, except for one line, spoken by, appropriately enough, Roger Corman. Poe's concise, morbid tales are ideally suited to Garcia's approach, and the director obviously has a deep appreciation not just for Poe, but for Corman's adaptations from 50 years ago. Edgar himself would like this one, I think.
SOLOMON AND SHEBA (1959) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: King Vidor
Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, George Sanders,
Marisa Pavan, David Farrar, John Crawford,
Finlay Currie, Harry Andrews, José Nieto
Yul Brynner (with hair) plays the king of Israel. Gina Lollobrigida (with curves) plays the queen of Sheba. George Sanders (with a wink and a sneer) plays Solomon's jealous, spiteful brother. There are battles and orgies and passion and betrayal and lust, but what really pisses off that Old Testament God is when Solomon decides to let the queen practice her own religion. (Jehovah would've vetoed the First Amendment, for sure.) Tyrone Power, who started out playing Solomon, inconveniently died of a heart attack early on, so Brynner replaced him. (Apparently that's Power in some of the more distant shots.) I'm pretty sure nobody in history ever looked better after a stoning than Gina does here.
ST. VINCENT (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Theodore Melfi
Bill Murray, Jaeden Lieberher, Melissa McCarthy,
Naomi Watts, Chris O'Dowd, Terrence Howard
Bill Murray plays a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, a disheveled misanthrope named Vincent, who rarely stirs from the reclining lawn chair in his crummy back yard except to go to the track or the bar. He owes money to everybody and his bank account's overdrawn, so when he's asked to babysit the kid next door for $10 or $12 an hour, he reluctantly agrees. The setup's obvious and you know the feel-good payoff is coming, but Murray's crotchety performance undercuts much of the sweetness. It turns out there's more to Vincent than anybody thinks, but like Bruce Dern's character in "Nebraska", he's way beyond the point where he cares, or expects anybody else to. He might have a heart in his chest cavity somewhere, but you'd never hear that from him, and even when Melfi starts plucking at the sentimental strings toward the end, Murray steers clear of them. W.C. Fields would approve.
THE HEART O' THE HILLS (1919) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Sidney A. Franklin
Mary Pickford, Harold Goodwin, Claire McDowell,
Allan Sears, Sam De Grasse, Jack Gilbert
Little Mary plays a Kentucky mountain girl who loses her home when some swindlers steal her daddy's land. A quaint pastoral melodrama with Pickford at her most earnest and obvious. (She was 26, playing a 13-year-old, and the results aren't especially convincing, but nobody at the time wanted "America's Sweetheart" to do anything else.) Highlight: an extended barn-dance sequence where the locals kick up their heels. Lowlight: the part where Mary puts on a sheet and hood and joins a Klan-like gang of night-riding vigilantes. Look for young John Gilbert in an early juvenile role as a lad from the lowlands who has eyes for Mountain Mary.
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jim Jarmusch
Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin,
Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright
A fang-in-cheek reflection on art, immortality and vampirism, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as night creatures who can live pretty much forever, as long as they take reasonable precautions and keep mainlining "the good stuff." They've been around for centuries, but in their current manifestations he's a reclusive rock star working out of a Detroit loft and she's a rock star's wife headquartered in a book-lined flat in Tangier. Her connection there is fellow vampire Kit Marlowe (John Hurt), still moaning about how Shakespeare stole "Hamlet" from him 400 years ago. It's all very droll and deadpan - just what you'd expect a Jim Jarmusch vampire movie to be. Fans of conventional horror will most likely be bored by it, but those who like what Jarmusch does should be amused. Swinton's otherworldly aura makes her a perfect vampire, and Mia Wasikowska is annoying as hell as the kid sister who pays her an unwelcome visit.
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: George Seaton
Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn,
Natalie Wood, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall,
William Frawley, Jerome Cowan, Philip Tonge,
Percy Helton, Thelma Ritter, Jack Albertson
The holiday classic about a department store Santa who claims to be the real thing. Hard-core cynics should stay away from this, but if the U.S. Post Office believes in Santa Claus, we all do, right?
Maureen O'Hara
(1920-2015)
JERSEY BOYS (2014) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Clint Eastwood
John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen,
Christopher Walken, Renée Marino, Michael Lomenda,
Joseph Russo, Lacey Hannan, Barry Livingston
If you were an American teenager in the 1960s, the Four Seasons were almost certainly a part of your high school soundtrack. Clint Eastwood's screen version of the hit Broadway show traces the group's history from the streets of Newark in the late 1950s to their 1990 induction into the Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame. It's kind of a mopey biopic - the guys don't look like they're having fun, even when they're having fun - but there are some inspired bits, like the part where Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) hears some car horns out the window of a city bus, and you realize, at the exact moment he does, that the horns have just played the first three notes of "Sherry", which he will proceed to write, more or less on the spot. (Robert Alda as George Gershwin had a similar epiphany in 1945 in "Rhapsody In Blue".) The highlight has got to be the finale - a curtain call that starts with the boys singing some a cappella doo-wop under a streetlight and builds into a rousing production number in which everybody in the cast takes part. Too bad the rest of the movie couldn't have that much life.
Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe
in "The Long Goodbye" (1973)
Viewers who weren't around then might find it hard to imagine, but in the early 1970s, the hottest (and coolest) actor in movies was Elliott Gould. He'd hit it big with "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969) and "M*A*S*H" (1970), and he was at a career peak in 1973, when he played Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye", Robert Altman's playfully off-kilter take on detective movies. One of the running jokes in the film is the way Marlowe smokes. He smokes everywhere, all the time, lighting his cigarettes with kitchen matches which he strikes on whatever surface he can reach without moving too much. Smoking is Marlowe's way of marking his territory. Sterling Hayden, bellowing up a storm as a boozy writer, calls him "Marlboro". In this scene, Marlowe has just ducked out of a tense but comical confrontation with with some gangsters. It's night, and as he walks out onto the street, he spots the femme fatale (Nina Van Pallandt) driving by in a convertible. He runs after her on foot and chases her for several blocks, dodging the nighttime traffic. The whole time he's running, he's smoking a cigarette. Finally, his luck runs out and a car knocks him down and the girl gets away, and the last thing you see is Marlowe lying unconscious, face-up on the pavement, the cigarette he was smoking still clenched between his lips. I'm sure other actors could've played Marlowe in this, but nobody else at the time could've waltzed through the picture with Gould's slouchy, wise-cracking ease. And the thing he does with the cigarette there - even Bogart would be impressed.
THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Altman
Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden,
Henry Gibson, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton,
David Arkin, David Carradine, Arnold Schwarzenegger
It's 3 a.m. in Los Angeles and all Philip Marlowe wants to do is sleep, but his cat is hungry and he's all out of Courry brand cat food, which is the only kind of cat food his cat will eat. So Marlowe shambles off to the all-night supermarket in search of cat food, plus some brownie mix for the airheads next door, the ones who put the la-la into la-la land. Notice the way Marlowe lights up a smoke as he walks into the supermarket. In this movie, there isn't anywhere Marlowe doesn't smoke. Tragically, the supermarket is all out of Courry brand cat food, and Marlowe's cat knows the difference and runs off. This for sure never happened to Humphrey Bogart, or Dick Powell, or Robert Montgomery, or Robert Mitchum, or James Garner, who all played Marlowe in other films. And it's just the beginning of a shaggy-dog detective story that really kicks in when an old friend of Marlowe's, played by baseball raconteur Jim Bouton, shows up looking drunk and disheveled and asks for a ride to Mexico. There's a countess (Nina Van Pallandt), an alcoholic writer (Sterling Hayden), a quack doctor (Henry Gibson) and a sadistic gangster (Mark Rydell), who could be the twin brother of the punk Roman Polanski played in "Chinatown". Marlowe purists hated this, and probably still do, but it's a loose, funny, throwaway memento from a time when Altman and Gould could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to, and did. Leigh Brackett wrote the script (however much of it wasn't improvised), and the setup's a riff on "The Third Man", right up to the whimsical closing shot. John Williams composed the score, which is really just one song played over and over in every musical style imaginable. Spoiler alert: Marlowe never does get his cat back. I hope that's not revealing too much.
THE ARTIST AND THE MODEL (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Fernando Trueba
Jean Rochefort, Aida Folch, Claudia Cardinale,
Götz Otto, Chus Lampreave, Mateo Deluz
The place is the South of France, somewhere near the Spanish border. The time is World War Two. The artist is an aging sculptor who has run out of ideas and apparently hasn't worked in a while. The model is a young vagrant who turns up in the town square where she catches the eye of the artist's wife, once a much-sought-after model herself. It's a nicely understated character study, photographed in black and white, which effectively captures a sculptor's view of the world, a concentration on line and contour more than color. Jean Rochefort plays the artist. Aida Folch plays the model. Claudia Cardinale plays the artist's wife, who knows exactly what's going on between her husband and the girl whose figure he's trying to capture in clay and stone. As a study in artistic collaboration, it's a useful companion piece to Gilles Bourdos' "Renoir" and Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse".
