Recreation (1914)

RECREATION  (1914)  ¢ ¢
    D: Charles Chaplin
    Charles Chaplin, Charles Bennett, Helen Carruthers
Charlie Chaplin, a girl, a park bench, a sailor on shore leave and a brick-throwing contest.

The Birth of the Tramp (2013)

THE BIRTH OF THE TRAMP  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Serge Bromberg, Eric Lange
A documentary on Charlie Chaplin's early years, specifically the time he spent making two-reel comedies at Keystone, Essanay and Mutual between 1914 and 1917. The film clips look great and include outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage of Chaplin on and off the set. David Robinson and Kevin Brownlow are the principal witnesses. Required viewing for Chaplin fans.

The Rounders (1914)

THE ROUNDERS  (1914)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Chaplin
    Charles Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, 
    Minta Durfee, Phyllis Allen, Al St. John
Chaplin and Arbuckle come home drunk to their respective wives. Fighting ensues and they go out again. The wives go after them, and there's a chase.

Time Out of Mind (2014)

TIME OUT OF MIND  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Oren Moverman
    Richard Gere, Ben Vereen, Jena Malone,
    Kyra Sedgwick, Steve Buscemi, Jeremy Strong
There's not much of a story here. It's just a few days in the life of a homeless old man scuffling around the city, trying to find a warm place to sleep at night and pawning his coat for a six-pack of beer. Richard Gere plays the guy, and it's some of the best acting he's ever done. He doesn't disappear completely - he's still Richard Gere - but when you see him panhandling out on a crowded sidewalk, a watch cap pulled down over his eyes and an indifferent world scurrying by all around him, darned if he doesn't look like the real thing. More often, he's photographed at a distance, through windows and doorways. Sometimes you barely see him. Sometimes he's not in the frame at all. He's invisible, and that's the point. He's got alcohol issues and mental health issues, not severe enough to keep him from scraping by on the street, but debilitating enough to prevent him from getting any real help. In one of the film's most frustrating scenes, he goes to a social-service agency where he's told that to qualify for assistance, he'll need to furnish a picture ID. He hasn't got one. He's asked for his social security number. He can't remember it. He's told that to get a new social security card he'll need a copy of his birth certificate. And at that point he gives up. It's more than he can process or handle. So he's back on the street, another shabby old man trying to score some beer money and hoping that when he shows up at the shelter he'll still have a bed for the night. Ignored. Forgotten. Invisible.

Merry Christmas

The Son of Kong (1933)

THE SON OF KONG  (1933)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ernest B. Schoedsack
    Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack, Victor Wong,
    John Marston, Frank Reicher, Lee Kohlmar
Cute nonsense in which the same daring explorer who captured King Kong meets up with the big guy's offspring. The opening's straight out of the Depression, with every character either broke or scraping by, and the leads end up back on Skull Island when the ship they're on is seized by its Bolshevik crew. Willis O'Brien's effects again are the highlight. Not to throw a monkey wrench into all of this, but whatever happened to Mrs. Kong?

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (2011)

HOODWINKED TOO! HOOD VS. EVIL  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mike Disa
Red, Granny, the Big Bad Wolf and Twitchy the hyper-caffeinated squirrel team up again when some evil characters try to steal the magic secret recipe for Norwegian Black Forest Feather Cake Truffle Divine. It's the second time around for the animated franchise, and it's still plenty of fun, even if it lacks the zip and originality of the first "Hoodwinked" movie. It got mostly terrible reviews, but I liked it, and so did the eight-year-old I watched it with. We might not have been laughing at the same things always, but we were both laughing. Hayden Panettiere replaces Anne Hathaway as Red. Joan Cusack shrieks and cackles as Verushka the Witch. My favorite character this time was the Wolf, followed by the Squirrel. The mean, moon-faced Hansel and Gretel figures are just plain creepy.

Desert Island Partners / Take 2

            Actor/director combinations that clicked:

                 Humphrey Bogart and John Huston
                 John Wayne and John Ford
                 Katharine Hepburn and George Cukor
                 Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer
                 Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel
                 Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith
                 Vincent Price and Roger Corman
                 Johnny Depp and Tim Burton
                 Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg
                 James Stewart and Anthony Mann

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE  (1946)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Frank Capra
    James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore,
    Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Gloria Grahame, 
    Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen
It's hard to imagine anybody except Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey, a small-town guy who's about to commit suicide on Christmas Eve, when he's saved by a guardian angel and sees what the world would be like if he'd never been born. Critics like David Thomson consider this a film noir, and it's dark enough to be one. It's a relentless blast of populist Americana that makes you wonder whether a 21st-century Republican wouldn't have to sympathize with Old Man Potter, the cutthroat banker played by Lionel Barrymore, rather than George and the notion that people are better off when they work together and help each other out. Every time I watch it, I swear the sentimental conclusion won't get to me. It always does.

All Things Must Pass (2015)

ALL THINGS MUST PASS: THE RISE AND FALL 
OF TOWER RECORDS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Colin Hanks
There used to be a Tower Records store on the Ave in Seattle. I've still got most of the music I bought there, cassettes and CDs and vinyl albums. I've even got a few of the bright yellow plastic bags I brought the music home in. This documentary tells the story of Tower and its irrepressible founder, Russ Solomon, who started out selling used 45s out of his dad's Sacramento drug store, created a billion-dollar empire based on a sense of fun and a love of music, and saw it all crash around the turn of the millennium when downloading changed the landscape forever. It was a great ride while it lasted, 40 years that defined what was arguably recorded music's golden age. The witnesses here include Dave Grohl, Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, who claims he spent more money at Tower Records than anybody else in history (and he's probably right). Another thing about that Tower Records on the Ave. That was where you bought your Grateful Dead tickets when the Dead came to town. You'd get there real early on the day they went on sale, wait for hours in a line that went down the street and around the block, and you'd buy your tickets in person right there in the store. Then you'd browse through the record bins, and if something caught your eye that you felt like taking a chance on, you'd buy that, too, and take it home in one of those bright yellow plastic bags. Ancient history, as those things go. R.I.P. Tower Records. All Things Must Pass.

Loving (2016)

LOVING  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jeff Nichols
    Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Will Dalton,
    Sharon Blackwood, Marton Csokas, David Jensen,
    Michael Shannon, Matt Malloy, Christopher Mann
The true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly named, mixed-race couple (she was black and he was white), whose 1967 Supreme Court case got miscegenation laws overturned across the United States. The movie spends very little time in court. (The Lovings chose not to attend the climactic argument before the justices in Washington.) Mostly it's a portrait of a marriage in snapshots - literal snapshots when a photographer shows up to shoot a profile for Life. The period decor is perfect, from the cars to the clothes to the dishes in the kitchen sink, and Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga give award-caliber performances as the Lovings. (Richard doesn't talk much - his wife is much more articulate - but watch how much Edgerton conveys with body language.) The melodramatic potential is extreme, but Nichols, like his actors, never overplays his hand. Watching something like this now, you can't help thinking about the legal battle 50 years later over same-sex marriage, and the same questions keep coming up in both cases: What took so long? And what's the big deal?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE  (1920)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John S. Robertson
    John Barrymore, Martha Mansfield, Nita Naldi,
    Brandon Hurst, Charles Lane, Louis Wohlheim
Good and evil fight for the soul of Dr. Henry Jekyll. Drugs are involved. Many more Jekyll-and-Hyde adaptations have come along since, but some horror fans consider this silent version the best. Barrymore looks slightly ill playing Jekyll, but he really goes nuts playing Hyde. 

The Grand Seduction (2013)

THE GRAND SEDUCTION  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Don McKellar
    Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch, Gordon Pinsent,
    Liane Balaban, Mark Critch, Lawrence Barry
A depressed seacoast town in Newfoundland gets a shot at economic salvation in the form of a brand-new job-creating factory. The catch: The village (technically a harbor) lacks a full-time physician. By chance and connivance, a doctor turns up, a young plastic surgeon with a particular fondness for cricket and cocaine, and the good citizens of Tickle Head see the answer to their prayers, if they can just persuade him to stay. Take one part "Local Hero", one part "Northern Exposure" and one part "Waking Ned Devine". Add a dash of "Rare Birds" and a sprinkling of "Cannery Row". Mix in a makeshift cricket pitch, a painful case of athlete's foot, a barrel of lies, some stray $5 bills and one dead, ice-cold fish. Pour on a gallon of cuteness and stir. What you get is "The Grand Seduction".

Under Capricorn (1949)

UNDER CAPRICORN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alfred Hitchcock
    Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding,
    Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker, Denis O'Dea
A rare Hitchcock period piece (he didn't like doing them), with Michael Wilding as a fortune seeker who lands in 19th-century Australia and gets tangled up in the lives of a wealthy landowner (Joseph Cotten) and his emotionally troubled wife (Ingrid Bergman). There are some impressively long takes in this - the scene where Bergman tells Wilding how she came to kill her brother recalls "Rope" - but nobody, including Hitchcock, would put this on a list with his best movies. Cotten, Bergman and Wilding are all supposed to be Irish, but you'd have a tough time finding a trace of an Irish accent between them.

Black Mass (2015)

BLACK MASS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Scott Cooper
    Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch,
    Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard,
    Julianne Nicholson, Rory Cochrane, Corey Stoll
Johnny Depp and Captain Jack Sparrow disappear completely in the cold-eyed stare of James "Whitey" Bulger, a murderous hood who became an FBI informant and then used his government connections to neutralize his criminal competitors, namely Boston's Italian mob. Watching this, you can't help thinking about "The Departed" and "Mystic River". Besides the Boston connection and the casting of Kevin Bacon in two of them, all three movies have a similar brass-knuckles vibe and a similar sense of foreboding and doom. Joel Edgerton plays John Connally, Bulger's enabler at the Bureau, and there's a flickering moment of recognition between Benedict Cumberbatch and Julianne Nicholson at a dinner party that recalls their work together in "August: Osage County". Depp's lethally contained performance is the key through it all. He might be a pussycat losing at gin to his sweet old mother, but when he fixes you with those cold, dead eyes and smiles, you might want to find someplace else to be, real quick.

Above Suspicion (1943)

ABOVE SUSPICION  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Thorpe
    Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray, Conrad Veidt,
    Basil Rathbone, Reginald Owen, Richard Ainley
Fred and Joan play newlyweds who spend their honeymoon doing a little cloak-and-dagger work in France and Austria on the eve of World War Two. With Conrad Veidt and Basil Rathbone both in the supporting cast, you know somebody's up to no good. Veidt's last film.

Arrival (2016)

ARRIVAL  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Denis Villeneuve
    Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
    Michael Stuhlberg, Mark O'Brien, Tzi Ma
Keir Dullea in "2001". Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters". Jodie Foster in "Contact". Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar". Amy Adams in this.

Earthquake (1974)

EARTHQUAKE  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Mark Robson
    Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy,
    Genevieve Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Lorne Greene,
    Barry Sullivan, Victoria Principal, Marjoe Gortner,
    Lloyd Nolan, John Randolph, Walter Matuschanskyasky
An epic from the heyday of big-budget disaster movies, with an all-star cast of Angelenos scrambling to survive "the big one." The earthquake effects, which worked pretty well on a big screen in 1974 (with a seat-rattling gimmick called "Sensurround"), look cheesy on a small screen now. Mario ("The Godfather") Puzo had a hand in the ridiculous script. The actors do what they can, but are mostly along for the ride, and in fact, the movie did inspire a theme-park ride at Universal later on, thereby realizing its full artistic potential. 

Carol (2015)

CAROL  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Todd Haynes
    Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler,
    Jake Lacy, Sarah Paulson, John Magaro
To begin with, Rooney Mara in this movie looks more like Audrey Hepburn than any actress who's not Audrey Hepburn has a right to look. In some shots, she's a dead ringer. It's spooky. Mara plays a young woman named Therese, an aspiring photographer who's working the Christmas season in a department store when she meets Carol (Cate Blanchett). It's love at first sight for both of them, if the meaningful glances they exchange are any indication, but Carol's got a daughter and a soon-to-be-ex-husband, and this is the 1950s, so it's complicated. It's the acting of the two leads that carries this one. As melodrama it's a little obvious, but it's not hard to imagine two women looking like Blanchett and Mara being attracted to each other. One's cool, elegant, affluent and smokes like she really means it. The other could've wandered over from the set of "Funny Face" or "Love In the Afternoon". And come to think of it, Blanchett played Katharine Hepburn in a movie once, too. 

A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974/2015)

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON  (1974/2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Les Blank
Leon Russell, who's like rock & roll's Mad Hatter, filmed on stage, in the studio, and hanging out back home in Oklahoma, in the days before his famously long hair and beard turned completely white. Blank doesn't take an on-screen directing credit on this - he's listed as the editor and cinematographer - and it almost looks like a movie that made itself. There's some good concert footage - Russell banging on a keyboard had charisma to burn - together with a lot of local color that Blank seems to have shot because it happened to cross his field of vision and he had a camera in his hand. One way to watch it would be to try to decide which people in the film seem the most wasted, and then try to guess which drugs they're on. Willie Nelson and George Jones turn up for a song each (without Russell), and at least one small animal was seriously harmed in a dramatic encounter between a baby chicken and a snake. Filmed between 1972 and 1974, but not officially released till 2015. 

Leon Russell

(1942-2016)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
    Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois,
    John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Keith Carradine,
    William Devane, Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy
A Robert Altman dreamscape set in the rainy, snowy, mist-shrouded Pacific Northwest, starring Warren Beatty as a gambler who wanders into a rough little frontier settlement called Presbyterian Church, sees that there aren't many women about, and sends off for a wagonload of prostitutes to rectify that. He gets rich in the process, but when the time comes to sell out, he refuses, and that seals his fate. Julie Christie plays the opium-smoking madam. Shelley Duvall has an early role as one of the whores. Keith Carradine makes an impression as a kid who loses his life over a pair of socks. Leonard Cohen's playfully mournful tunes provide the musical backdrop, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography looks like nothing else on film, and the themes and images Altman conjures up have a nice way of mirroring Cohen's lyrics. Or maybe it's all just a dream, carved out of the rain and fog, trailing off and drifting away like a half-heard scrap of conversation, or the smoke from Julie Christie's opium pipe. 

Leonard Cohen

(1934-2016)

Naked Edge / Take 6

Elizabeth McGovern in "Ragtime"
Kelly McGillis in "Witness"
Jennifer Connelly in "The Hot Spot"
Mia Farrow in "A Wedding"
Jamie Lee Curtis in "Trading Places"
Thora Birch in "American Beauty"
Joey Heatherton in "Bluebeard"
Julie Andrews in "S.O.B."
Samantha Mathis in "Pump Up the Volume"
Cybill Shepherd in "The Last Picture Show"

The Devil's Violinist (2013)

THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bernard Rose
    David Garrett, Jared Harris, Andrea Deck,
    Joely Richardson, Christian McKay,
    Veronica Ferres, Helmut Berger, Olivia d'Abo
Niccolò Paganini makes a deal with you-know-who and gets what he thinks he wants - rock-star recognition for his virtuosity on the violin. It seems like a good idea at the time, but of course there are strings attached. David Garrett plays Paganini and he's a virtuoso himself, with the dreamy look a 19th-century groupie could go for, but there's no edge to his acting, and Paganini definitely had an edge. Jared Harris gets the sinister side of Satan, but in the beginning, at least, the devil has to be seductive, too, and Harris isn't. The movie's dedicated to the late Ken Russell, but it lacks the bad-boy outrageousness Russell brought to his musical biopics. The best way to watch it might be to skip to the musical segments, especially the one in the bar, where Paganini rocks out on one string. How does he do that? Maybe the devil had something to do with it. 

Being There (1979)

BEING THERE  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hal Ashby
    Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvin Douglas,
    Jack Warden, Richard Basehart, Richard Dysart
Peter Sellers plays a perfect cipher, an impeccably dressed blank slate who has lived into middle age without ever leaving the house in which he's always resided, except to go out and work in the garden. When he's forced out into the world, he's embraced as a savant, though he knows nothing other than horticulture and what he's watched on television. His name is Chance, and because he has no recorded past and no real identity, he can be whatever others see in him, or whatever they need him to be. It's an ideal role for Sellers, an actor who hardly seemed to exist beyond the characters he played on the screen. Keep an eye on the final image, and see what you think it says about who or what Chance might really be. 

Game Change (2012)

GAME CHANGE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Roach
    Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Ed Harris,
    Peter MacNicol, Jamey Sheridan, Sarah Paulson
How Sarah Palin, the ambitious, outspoken, telegenic and alarmingly ignorant governor of Alaska, became the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, and the political circus that followed in her wake. Julianne Moore virtually disappears into her role as Palin. Put Moore, Tina Fey and the real Sarah Palin side by side and you'd think you were seeing triple. Ed Harris plays John McCain, the man at the top of the ticket, trying to salvage some speck of decency as his running mate goes off the rails and the campaign turns increasingly ugly. Woody Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt, the political guru whose job is to keep Palin's glaring limitations in check and her grandstanding behavior under control till early November. It's tempting in retrospect to view Palin as an aberration, a bad political joke. Based on the slimefest we've witnessed lately, that would be a mistake. If we continue to vote for cretins and idiots, we're bound to elect a few, and we've got to do better than that. If we don't, the joke's on us.

Ministry of Fear (1944)

MINISTRY OF FEAR  (1944)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Fritz Lang
    Ray Milland Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond,
    Dan Duryea, Alan Napier, Hillary Brooke
Ray Milland walks out of an asylum where he's spent two years for allegedly killing his wife. He buys a train ticket to London, and to kill time while he's waiting, wanders around a fund-raising fair where he wins a cake by correctly guessing its weight. He gets on the train, cake in hand, but it turns out this is no ordinary cake, and there are Nazis everywhere, and hardly anybody a newly released mental patient can confide in. A lot of this plays like a Hitchcock movie, and it's from a book by Graham Greene, which is close enough, with plenty of doubt and suspicion to go around for everybody. Can you trust the kindly bookstore owner, or the nice young tailor taking your measurements for a new suit, or the blind man sharing your compartment on the train? Not in this movie.

Chappie (2015)

CHAPPIE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neill Blomkamp
    Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Yo-Landi Visser,
    Ninja, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver
Sometime in the future, in Neill Blomkamp's dystopian Johannesburg, a damaged police robot captured by a small gang of thieves becomes sentient, and has to adjust to a world where the 1% rule and most of humanity scrapes by in a violent slum. This has more of an escapist, comic-book feel to it than "District 9" and "Elysium", not that those movies weren't escapist, too. The metaphorical implications are more shaded and the emotional stakes, oddly enough, are higher, what with a cute robot and all. Sharlto Copley, without whom Blomkamp apparently couldn't make a movie, plays the robot, Chappie. Dev Patel, of the "Marigold Hotel" films, plays Chappie's creator, a nerd scientist working for a corporate overlord played by Sigourney Weaver. Hugh Jackman, with a terrible haircut and muscles left over from his last outing as Wolverine, plays a mercenary rival who's desperate to get his own giant monster robot online. Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser play the hoodlum couple who become Chappie's surrogate parents. (They also wrote most of the rap tunes on the soundtrack.) Blomkamp's vision of a grimy, ruined future remains distinctive. Nobody who's watched his other films would mistake "Chappie" for the work of anybody else.

Addams Family Values (1993)

ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Barry Sonnenfeld
    Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd,
    Joan Cusack, Christina Ricci, Carol Kane, 
    Jimmy Workman, Carel Struycken, Peter MacNicol,
    Christine Baranski, Nathan Lane, Peter Graves
Morticia goes into labor and has a baby. (It's an Addams!) She and Gomez celebrate by doing a wicked tango. Pugsley and Wednesday don't like the new kid and try to kill him (several times), but then they're dropped off at summer camp, where they don't exactly fit in. Lurch, Cousin Itt and Granny are reduced to cameos, but Thing gets to drive a car (badly), and Uncle Fester falls hard for a gold digger played by Joan Cusack. That's the movie, pretty much, and fans of family-friendly morbidity will like it. The Thanksgiving pageant the kids put on at Camp Chippewa is hilarious, and Ricci as the funereal Wednesday stands out in the ghoulish cast. 

Happy Halloween

The Water Diviner (2014)

THE WATER DIVINER  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Russell Crowe
    Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan,
    Cen Yilmaz, Jai Courtney, Jacqueline McKenzie
Russell Crowe's epic World War One movie, released exactly 100 years after the disastrous battle at Gallipoli. Crowe plays an Australian farmer named Connor, who's sent three sons off to fight in the Great War. They've all turned up missing, and all are presumed dead. Connor's wife blames him and she's gone mad, and when she dies an apparent suicide, he travels to Turkey after the Armistice, on an obsessive quest to locate and bring back the remains. It's a daunting task, complicated by the fact that the occupying Brits won't cooperate, the Turks hate the Brits, the Greeks and Turks are still at war with each other, and thousands of corpses lie buried where they fell, scattered over eight square miles. Crowe obviously has a passion for the story and an instinct for how to tell it. He knows his way around a movie camera, too. Some images, like the simple shot of masked mourners in a Turkish funeral procession, are likely to stay with you awhile. His flashback depictions of the battle are horrifying. There's no glory in any of it. After a day's fighting, night falls and the battlefield goes quiet, except for the despairing screams and moans of the not yet dead. That's a side of war the movies rarely show us. Crowe does. Even when his choices seem questionable, you can see why he made them. It leaves you hoping he gets to direct again. Water, coffee and the Arabian Nights figure prominently in the script. 

Prehistoric Women (1950)

PREHISTORIC WOMEN  (1950)  ¢
    D: Gregory G. Tallas
    Laurette Luez, Allan Nixon, Joan Shawlee,
    Judy Landon, Mara Lynn, Jo Carroll Dennison
This movie's set in a caveman society where the men treat the women like slaves. Then the women run off and turn the tables on the men. Then one of the men discovers fire and the men take over again. Then the men and women fight off a big hungry giant and love resolves everything. Everybody speaks some caveman language in which no sentence has more than one or two syllables. An offscreen narrator delivers a documentary play-by-play of the action for those who find the story too intricate to track. I'm not sure who those people would be, but the filmmakers weren't taking any chances. As William Hurt put it in "The Big Chill", "sometimes you just have to let art flow over you." I guess this is one of those times. 

Jimmy's Hall (2014)

JIMMY'S HALL  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ken Loach
    Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Jim Norton,
    Frances Magee, Aileen Henry, Andrew Scott
A left-wing activist named Jimmy Gralton returns to rural Ireland in 1932, after a ten-year exile in the States. He finds that the community hall he built before he left has gone to ruin, and when his neighbors show an interest in bringing it back, he starts to realize that the "quiet life" he claims to be looking for isn't going to happen. Ken Loach pulls no punches about where his sympathies lie, and it's a safe bet he never will. (Those who don't share at least some sense of solidarity with the collective aspirations of working people should probably avoid his films altogether.) At the same time, he does allow the main villain of the piece, a parish priest, a moment or two of grace. (The landowners and their hired goons, not so much.) And there's one scene, where Jimmy (Barry Ward) and an old flame (Simone Kirby) dance alone at night in the quiet, empty hall, that's as agonizing and intimate as anything you'll see all year. At the end, as Jimmy's being hauled away once more, somebody derisively compares him to Charlie Chaplin. The analogy's not accidental. Chaplin made no secret of his left-wing sentiments, either, and he had a habit of wrapping things up with a speech. That happens here, too, and it works, partly because of the passion in its proletarian message, and partly because Loach, like Chaplin, knows how to make a movie.

The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

THE GORE GORE GIRLS  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Herschell Gordon Lewis
    Frank Kress, Amy Farrell, Henny Youngman,
    Hedda Lubin, Russ Badger, Jackie Kroeger 
A classic bit of schlock by blood-and-guts pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis, about a serial killer who goes around turning strippers into mutilated corpses. The point-blank carnage is extremely graphic, but in the context of the whole stupefying package, that's just part of the joke. One victim gets her face boiled in oil with a bunch of french fries. Another gets her backside clubbed to a pulp with a meat tenderizer. A third gets stabbed while chewing bubble gum and dies blowing a bubble of blood. What fun.

Herschell Gordon Lewis

(1926-2016)

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014)

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Zellner
    Rinko Kikuchi, Noboyuki Katsube, Shirley Venard,
    David Zellner, Kanako Higashi, Ichi Kyokaku
Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a 29-year-old office drone living in a dingy flat in Tokyo, alone except for a pet rabbit named Bunzo. When you first see her at the start of the film, she's walking along a black sand beach, studying what appears to be a homemade treasure map. The map leads her to a cave, where she digs up a waterlogged VHS copy of the Coen Brothers movie "Fargo". The tape is barely playable, but she uses it, and later a DVD, to study the scene where Steve Buscemi stashes the suitcase full of money in the snow. She becomes convinced it's her destiny to go to America and find the money. So she does. What this movie is really is a character study with a protagonist who's mentally ill. At home in Tokyo, she's functionally delusional. In Minnesota in the dead of winter, she's a lost soul, Red Riding Hood walking the frozen highways wrapped in a bulky, multi-colored blanket, relentless in her pursuit of a treasure that only she believes is real. In the end she finds transcendence in the only way transcendence can really be found. Some might think the ending's not a happy one, considering where Kumiko seems to end up, but it is. It is. 

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)

IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE 
    D: Edward L. Cahn                      (1958)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Marshall Thompson, Shawn Smith, Kim Spalding,
    Ann Doran, Dabbs Greer, Ray Corrigan
B-movie hero Marshall Thompson plays an American astronaut, the only survivor of an ill-fated voyage to Mars. Sketchy circumstantial evidence suggests he murdered the rest of the crew, and a second ship is dispatched to bring him back to Earth for a court-martial. The mystery of whether he done it gets resolved pretty quickly on the return trip home, and it just as quickly becomes clear that there's a monster aboard, killing off the space travelers one by one. This is the kind of '50s sci-fi thriller in which the inside of the spacecraft is roughly the size of a warehouse, and guns and grenades can be used against the monster without doing any structural damage to the ship. It's one of the movies that turned up on TV a lot when I was a teenager, and its shortcomings were obvious even then, which of course didn't prevent us from watching it over and over again. The guys who would dream up "Alien" 20 years later must've been watching it, too, back then, taking notes.

In Her Shoes (2005)

IN HER SHOES  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Curtis Hanson
    Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine,
    Mark Feuerstein, Ken Howard, Candice Azzara, 
    Brooke Smith, Francine Beers, Norman Lloyd
Collette and Diaz play sisters who clash over everything. MacLaine plays the grandmother who got out of their lives when they were kids. They all end up in a retirement community in Florida, where a gaggle of geriatric busybodies see to in that everything works out the way it should. A chick flick, for sure, the kind of movie where the responsible older sister starts to move toward happiness and fulfillment when she edges away from a successful career and starts dating an ex-colleague - a man with a successful career. The players make it worth looking at. Diaz and Collette are typecast perfectly as polar opposites who drive each other crazy but aren't complete without each other, while MacLaine projects indestructible star power as a woman who's been around the block a few hundred times and can cut through bullshit with a glance. 90-year-old Norman Lloyd does a fine bit as a blind professor who helps Diaz with her reading. 

Curtis Hanson

(1945-2016)

The Hit List: Boris Karloff

"The Monster was the best friend I ever had."
  Boris Karloff

   You can't help wondering how Boris Karloff's career might've turned out if he hadn't changed his name from William Henry Pratt. "Pratt" doesn't automatically send chills running up and down your spine. "Karloff," though, that's a different matter.
    He emigrated from England as a young man and did manual labor between stints with theatrical touring companies in Canada and the U.S. He first landed in Hollywood in 1916 and eventually found work in silent films, playing (what else?) villains. He had acted in something like 80 pictures, and the movies had started to talk, by the time he landed the role that defined him, the Monster in "Frankenstein" (1931). From that point on, he was typecast in horror, and while he objected to the word - he preferred "terror" - he often said that the Monster was the best thing that ever happened to him. 
    He was bow-legged, with a slightly stooped posture (and a bad back) that came from years of hard physical work. In films he was a nightmare figure, often cruel and just as often tormented. The more murderous and bloodthirsty his characters were, the more he seemed to love playing them.
    He made all kinds of movies over the years, some of them classics, others worth watching only because he was in them. Here are a few of the better ones:

"Frankenstein"
(1931/James Whale)
"The Bride of Frankenstein"
(1935/Whale)
"Son of Frankenstein"
(1939/Rowland V. Lee)
"House of Frankenstein"
(1944/Erle C. Kenton)
In the first three, Karloff plays the Monster. In the last, he's a doctor who brings the Monster back to life. 
"The Mask of Fu Manchu"
(1932/Charles Brabin)
Karloff plays the diabolical Chinese warlord, with Myrna Loy as his "ugly and insignificant daughter."
"The Mummy"
(1932/Karl Freund)
In one of cinema's most horrifying scenes, Karloff's character, an ancient Egyptian high priest named Imhotep, is cursed and buried alive.
"The Black Cat"
(1934/Edgar G. Ulmer)
"The Raven"
(1935/Lewis Friedlander)
Evil times two: Karloff and Lugosi.
"Mr. Wong, Detective"
(1938/William Nigh)
Mr. Wong was the Monogram Studio's answer to Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan. Karloff played the B-movie sleuth in five pictures between 1938 and 1940.
"Tower of London"
(1939/Lee)
Karloff plays Mord, the club-footed executioner, whose manner is as menacing as his ax is sharp.
"The Body Snatcher"
(1945/Robert Wise)
Karloff's a grave robber digging up corpses for Dr. Henry Daniell.
"Bedlam"
(1946/Mark Robson)
Boris plays the malevolent director of London's notorious mental institution.
"The Raven"
(1963/Roger Corman)
Boris and Vincent Price play rival sorcerers in a comedy derived only nominally from Edgar Allan Poe. 
"Targets"
(1968/Peter Bogdanovich)
Karloff's last great role, a thriller about a gunman at a drive-in movie theater, with Boris, cast as an aging horror star, essentially playing himself. 

   From the early '50s on, Karloff did a lot of television. He was a detective in Britain in "Colonel March of Scotland Yard", and hosted and often acted in two anthology shows - "The Veil", a Hal Roach production that never aired, and "Thriller", in which he introduced a strange new tale each week with the reassuring tagline, "As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this will be a thriller." His distinctive voice enhanced "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (1966), and in a particular treat for horror fans, he joined Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney Jr. in "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing" (1962), the famous Halloween episode of "Route 66", appearing as the Monster one last time. 
    He never stopped working, even toward the end, when emphysema had slowed him down and arthritis had crippled him. His last four movies were cheapies made in Mexico (with his scenes shot in Los Angeles) and released only after his death. 
    Offscreen, he was a labor activist, a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, and by all accounts a genuinely nice man, not at all like the killers and ghouls he played on film. Over time, he became as loved as his characters were feared, like everybody's kindly grandfather who happened to play monsters for a living. 
    He died on February 2, 1969, the most widely admired horror star ever. He was 81.

Katharine Hepburn: All About Me (1993)

KATHARINE HEPBURN: ALL ABOUT ME 
    D: David Heeley                                (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢
A spry and feisty Katharine Hepburn talks about her favorite subject - herself - and looks back on her remarkable life and career. The film clips include home movies and screen tests, most strikingly a pre-Hollywood Hepburn experimenting with costumes and makeup, and a mid-'30s Kate in color as Joan of Arc. Then there's later off-screen footage of Hepburn playing Parcheesi, bossing her small entourage through a shopping expedition and tooling around on a bicycle without a helmet at 85. Helmet? Who needs a helmet when you're as hard-headed as Katharine Hepburn?

A Conversation With Gregory Peck (1999)

A CONVERSATION WITH GREGORY PECK
    D: Barbara Kopple                           (1999)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
For a few years before his death in 2003, Gregory Peck did what Vincent Price and Cary Grant had done: went on tour with a series of public appearances, telling stories and fielding questions about his long and distinguished career. Those Q&A sessions provide the centering point for this documentary, which also tracks Peck as he travels the world, graciously deals with adoring fans, scribbles notes for a possible memoir, and spends time with his family, most visibly his pregnant daughter Cecilia. Director Barbara Kopple did something similar with Woody Allen in "Wild Man Blues", but where Woody's talent for ad-libbing could carry that film over some of its slow spots, there's a sense here that Peck and those around him are always a little self-conscious, aware that there's a camera around and that they're in front if it, expected in some way to perform. What they're doing isn't always very interesting, and they talk sometimes when they don't have a whole lot to say. Martin Scorsese turns up very briefly, making you wonder what kind of film you might get if Peck and Scorsese had sat down and discussed movies in a little more depth. The rewards in this conversation are relatively minor, and include Peck recalling (with obvious affection) the time he spent making "Roman Holiday" with Audrey Hepburn, along with his response to a question about whether Sophia Loren was really naked during the shower scene in "Arabesque", something the rest of us have always sort of wondered about, too.

Listen To Me Marlon (2015)

LISTEN TO ME MARLON  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Riley
Marlon Brando's life and career, documented with clips from his films, home movies, television news footage, and - most revealing - excerpts from audio tapes the actor recorded over the years. Many consider Brando the most influential actor of the 20th century, and there's no doubt that at his best he was electrifying. Other times he seemed content to phone it in or piss it away, collecting an oversized paycheck and not even bothering to hide his indifference. (His own critique of his work in "Candy" and "A Countess From Hong Kong" is lacerating.) Like some of his characters, he was smart, brooding, sensitive, angry, mischievous, sometimes passionate, often bored, sexually voracious and emotionally mixed-up, his mercurial behavior motivated by intense creative ambition and equally intense self-loathing. He might've come off like a guy who had wandered too far up his own navel, but for better or worse, there was nobody else like him, and you can see some of that here. And hear some of it, too.

Dark Passage (1947)

DARK PASSAGE  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Delmer Daves
    Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett,
    Agnes Moorehead, Tom D'Andrea, Douglas Kennedy
Bogart escapes from San Quentin in a barrel, makes his way to San Francisco with the help of a dame (Lauren Bacall), gets a new face with the help of a cabdriver who knows a back-alley plastic surgeon, and tries to find out who really murdered his wife - the rap that got him sent up in the first place. So Bogart's on the run, and the plot's a little crazy, and even the people you'd kind of like to trust you're never really sure you can trust, and this is film noir territory, obviously, with some famously subjective camerawork. (For the first half-hour or s0, till after the surgery, you never see Bogart's face.) That might be a gimmick, but it works in the context of the story, and if the ending seems a little upbeat for a 1940s thriller, it should be noted that Bogart and Bacall were newlyweds then, and happy, so maybe we can cut them some slack. 

The Lego Movie (2014)

THE LEGO MOVIE  (2014)  ¢ ¢
    D: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Some characters made out of tiny bits of plastic battle some other tiny plastic characters led by an evil president who wants to control the world and everything in it. A 100-minute ad for the Lego industry, with a mixed message about whether it's more useful and fun to follow the directions, or to build outside the box. There are some amusing movie references and voice work by Liam Neeson, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman and others, but the range of expression you can get from an action figure out of a Lego kit is limited. I can see where it works as a feature-length commercial, though. If the Lego Group didn't furnish the entire budget for this, it should have.

Something Wild (1961)

SOMETHING WILD  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jack Garfein 
    Carroll Baker, Ralph Meeker, Mildred Dunnock,
    Jean Stapleton, Martin Koslek, Clifton James
An offbeat drama about a young woman whose life spirals into a nightmare after she's raped. Well-acted and disturbing, with a musical score by Aaron Copland and titles by Saul Bass. Baker's performance has a disembodied quality, except when anybody tries to touch her, a trauma victim in an ongoing state of shock, and Meeker's both frightening and pathetic as a guy who saves her life and then wants something in return. It gets real crazy toward the end, not that it has far to go. Look for Jean Stapleton in a small role as Baker's tenement neighbor. You wouldn't know it was her necessarily, but it's not hard to recognize Edith Bunker's voice.

The Big Short (2015)

THE BIG SHORT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Adam McKay
    Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling,
    Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Hamish Linklater,
    Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei
You wouldn't expect a movie about the housing bubble and financial crash of 2008 to be a comedy, but this one is. The issues are complicated, so every once in a while somebody will conveniently appear to explain them to you. Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez are two of them, but my personal favorite is Margot Robbie, who delivers her lecture while sipping champagne in a bubble bath. The characters are all operators on various levels of the food chain, guys who saw what was happening and predicted what was coming and raked in millions from what they knew was a house of cards. It was a big-bucks scam, and the people who lost their homes and got stuck with the bill were not the same people who made off with all the loot. What's scary is that nothing much has changed, some of those same crooks are still moving huge sums of money around, and it's only a matter of time before something just as bad (or worse) happens again. Sometimes you just gotta laugh.

Burroughs: The Movie (1983)

BURROUGHS: THE MOVIE  (1983)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Howard Brookner
That would be William S. Burroughs, the Beat writer, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan. This Burroughs was a tall, elegant, hollow-cheeked, chain-smoking heroin addict who wrote books with titles like "Queer" and "Junky" and "Naked Lunch". And he had a great voice, a relaxed, resonant drawl that made words sound good. Burroughs does a lot of talking, and a lot of reading, in this documentary, so you get to hear a lot of that voice. Whether what he has to say is profound or merely eccentric is something you'll have to work out for yourself: There's a wide spectrum of opinion about Burroughs. Witnesses include Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, Terry Southern and, very briefly, a young Patti Smith. The trail that winds back from Hunter S. Thompson leads directly to William S. Burroughs.

Brooklyn (2015)

BROOKLYN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Crowley
    Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson,
    Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Jessica Paré, 
    Fiona Glascott, Jane Brennan, Nora-Jane Noone 
This is a movie about coming and going, leaving and arriving, risk and opportunity and going back and finding your place in the world. It's the immigrant experience told through the story of a young Irish woman named Eillis (Saoirse Ronan), who emigrates to New York somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. There's seasickness on the boat going over, homesickness after she gets there, the drudgery of a job in a department store, and the catty behavior of the other girls in the boarding house where she rents a room. She has allies (a priest played by Jim Broadbent) and assets (she's smart and has a head for numbers), and eventually there's an Italian boyfriend (Emory Cohen) who takes her to the beach at Coney Island, but it's a struggle. Ronan gives a beautifully understated performance, conveying Eillis's uncertainty, resilience, determination and inner strength, her transition to adulthood playing out before your eyes. Her story might be specific to its time frame and country of origin, but in an increasingly immigrant world, it's hard not to see it as universal. Change a few of those details and she could be our ancestors. She could be us.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mel Brooks
    Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle,
    Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman,
    Gene Hackman, Kenneth Mars, Richard Haydn,
    Liam Dunn, Anne Beesley, Rolfe Sedan
" . . . Walk - this way . . . My grandfather's work was doodoo! . . . Good night, Frau Blucher . . . What knockers . . . No, it's pronounced "Frahnkensteen" . . . No, it's pronounced "Eyegor" . . . Put - the candle - back . . . Pardon me, boy. Is this the Transylvania station? . . . Damn your eyes . . . What hump? . . . There, wolf. There, castle . . . He vould have an enormous schwanstucker . . . Abby Normal . . . Let me out. Let me out of here. Let me the hell out of here . . . Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay? . . . Wait. Where are you going? I was gonna make espresso . . . You take the blonde and I'll take the one in the toiban . . . My name is FRANKENSTEIN! . . . Class - is - dismissed . . . "

Gene Wilder

(1933-2016)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Anthony Minghella
    Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow,
    Cate Blanchett, Celia Weston, Lisa Eichhorn,
    Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall
Matt Damon gives one of his trickiest performances as Tom Ripley, an affable con man whose talent for impersonation and forgery allows him to mingle with the swells. The story starts out with an incidental case of mistaken identity - Tom's a working-class pianist playing a musical gig in a borrowed Princeton blazer - and from that point on it's a game in which he continually ups the ante to see how far he can carry the ruse and how much he can get away with. It's not that Tom's such a talented liar, because, really, he's not. What he's good at is manipulating other people's perceptions, gauging what others see in him and becoming what they want him to be. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow play a spoiled couple who take him in. Cate Blanchett's a girl who catches his eye and keeps crossing his path. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a pestering cynic who sees right through the deceit. The terrain is F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the idle affluence of the characters to the idyllic locations they idle around in. The story's by Patricia Highsmith.

Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

HEARTBREAK RIDGE  (1986)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Clint Eastwood, Mario Van Peebles, Marsha Mason,
    Everett McGill, Arlen Dean Snyder, Moses Gunn,
    Eileen Heckart, Boyd Gaines, Bo Svenson
Clint whips a platoon of misfit marines into shape and leads them in the assault on Grenada. A formula Eastwood vehicle, notable for its fabulously inventive use of R-rated language. This movie does for profanity what "The Gauntlet" did for bullets. A guilty pleasure.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT 
    D: Ana Lily Amirpour                    (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh,
    Mozhan Marnò, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo
A woman walks the night streets alone in a place called Bad City. She wears a chador over a striped pullover and sometimes rides a skateboard. She rarely speaks and has a solemn look about her and seems to appear or vanish at will. And every now and then, when the urge and opportunity come together, she finds a neck to bite and feeds. The woman has no name, and she's a vampire, and this is not like any other vampire movie you've ever seen. It's in black and white and it was filmed in and around Bakersfield, California, but everybody in it speaks Farsi and the signage is in Arabic script. It plays out at its own pace, which is usually dead slow. The music on the soundtrack is a mixture of spaghetti western riffs and pop tunes from the Middle East. The nocturnal cityscape looks like a vacant industrial slum. Sheila Vand in the title role is a strangely enticing, sad-eyed angel of death. A guy walking the night streets alone in a place like Bad City, or Bakersfield, California, could fall for a vampire like that.

The Conqueror (1956)

THE CONQUEROR  (1956)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Dick Powell
    John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz,
    Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, John Hoyt,
    William Conrad, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef
The Mongols take on the Tartars, with John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The production values aren't bad, but the script's a legendary clunker, and there's nothing the miscast Duke or anybody else can do about that. The results are laughable, and Wayne mostly avoided discussing the film for the rest of his life. Agnes Moorehead plays the great warrior's mother, and if you look closely, you might spot Lee Van Cleef. Unfortunate side note: the movie was shot in the Utah desert, close by (and downwind from) a nuclear test site. A scary percentage of those who worked on it, including Wayne, Hayward and Powell, would die of cancer.