Paddington (2014)

PADDINGTON  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Paul King
    Ben Whishaw, Nicole Kidman, Sally Hawkins,
    Hugh Bonneville, Imelda Staunton, Michael Gambon,
    Peter Capaldi, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent
When an earthquake destroys his home in Peru, a bear stows away on a ship bound for England, subsisting on marmalade and hiding out in a covered lifeboat. He makes it to London with one marmalade sandwich to spare, but now he's without a home in a strange city and an evil taxidermist collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum is determined to see him stuffed. A funny, charming family movie that combines live action and animation in a way that allows a top-of-the-line cast to share the screen with the world's most endearing homeless bear. Ben Whishaw does the voice of Paddington. Nicole Kidman's the cold-blooded taxidermist. Favorite yucky bit: the part where Paddington, dispatched to the loo to "freshen up," finds a novel use for toothbrushes.

Advise and Consent (1962)

ADVISE AND CONSENT  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Otto Preminger
    Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton,
    Don Murray, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres,
    Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Burgess Meredith,
    Paul Ford, George Grizzard, Betty White
A Cold War civics lesson starring Franchot Tone as the president, Lew Ayres as the vice president, and Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Don Murray and Peter Lawford as senators passing judgment on Henry Fonda's qualifications to be secretary of state. What's interesting about this is how topical it remains, more than 50 years after its release. Our politics are even more stupidly polarized now, but otherwise nothing much has changed. Back then, the most toxic thing you could be accused of was being a communist, execpt for one other thing, as Murray's character tragically finds out. (Murray's good, but Montgomery Clift in this role would've been perfect.) The rest is mostly back-slapping, back-stabbing, wheeling, dealing, deceit and hot air. Like I said, nothing much has changed. 

Even Though the Whole World Is Burning (2014)

EVEN THOUGH THE WHOLE WORLD IS 
BURNING                                   (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Stefan C. Schaefer
"On the last day of the world," the poet W.S. Merwin wrote, "I would want to plant a tree." Merwin's in his late 80s now, and blind, living out the time that remains in the palm forest he planted on Maui, waiting, as my nephew on the island likes to say, to become an ancestor, to join the spirit world. This documentary catches up with Merwin a little earlier in his journey, in France and Hawaii, reading, writing, studying, and talking about his life, work, activism, and the critical importance of environmental stewardship. It's an intelligent portrait of a singular human being, a man who's had the talent, audacity and luck to spend a lifetime creating and exploring, pretty much on his own terms, and to accomplish something lasting and worthwhile in the process. You don't have to be a poet, or even know much about poetry, to be inspired by Merwin's passion for his work, or impressed with is life and legacy. If everybody in the world had this much charisma, we'd have to redefine the word, or find a whole new one. And at last report, Merwin was still planting trees. 

Screen Test / Take 7

Match the following actresses with the movies in which they played the title role:

                            1. Tilda Swinton
                            2. Jodie Foster
                            3. Leslie Caron
                            4. Julie Christie
                            5. Sissy Spacek
                            6. Mia Farrow
                            7. Vanessa Redgrave
                            8. Nastassja Kinski
                            9. Keira Knightley
                          10. Cate Blanchett

                            a. "Tess"
                            b. "Alice"
                            c. "Petulia"
                            d. "Domino"
                            e. "Elizabeth"
                            f. "Isadora"
                            g. "Orlando"
                            h. "Gigi"
                            i.  "Carrie"
                            j.  "Nell"

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

Descendants (2015)

DESCENDANTS  (2015)  ¢
    D: Kenny Ortega
    Dove Cameron, Cameron Boyce, Sofia Carson,
    Booboo Stewart, Mitchell Hope, Kristin Chenoweth
    Kathy Najimi, Brenna D'Amico, Sarah Jeffrey
A live-action fantasy produced for the Disney Channel, 112 minutes of insipid cuteness, in which the evil offspring of the villains in "Aladdin", "Snow White", "101 Dalmatians" and "Sleeping Beauty" enroll in a prep school and learn what it's like to be good. Subjecting any sentient life-form other than preteen girls to repeated viewings of this is considered torture under the Geneva Convention and a violation of international law. Trust me. You don't want to go there. Ever. You've been warned.

Zombeavers (2014)

ZOMBEAVERS  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jordan Rubin
    Rachel Melvin, Cortney Palm, Lexi Atkins,
    Hutch Dano, Jake Weary, Peter Gilroy,
    Rex Linn, Brent Briscoe, Phyllis Katz
The usual party of college-age morons drive out to the usual isolated cabin in the woods for the usual weekend of drinking and sex. If you've seen a single slasher movie, you know something bad usually happens with a setup like this, and as usual, something bad does: The morons are attacked by an army of angry, rabid, zombie beavers. The movie's relatively faithful to the genre conventions it's sending up, never mind that the genre itself was never all that serious. Cortney Palm gets the obligatory topless scene and takes home the Aubrey Plaza deadpan-with-attitude award. Rachel Melvin, playing the smartest of the morons (the girl with the glasses), acts like she's channeling Parker Posey. Beaver jokes abound, of course, but in a movie called "Zombeavers", you'd be wrong to expect anything else. Stick around till the credits are over for a clue to what form the next zombie peril will take. 

Midnight (1939)

MIDNIGHT  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mitchell Leisen
    Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore,
    Francis Lederer, Mary Astor, Monty Woolley
A Cinderella comedy with Colbert as a chorus girl from Indiana who gets off the train in Paris with five centimes in her purse, and it's night and she's got no place to stay and it's raining. She's in luck, though, because she's befriended immediately by a cab driver (Don Ameche), and then by a wealthy socialite (John Barrymore) who enlists her in a cockeyed scheme to save his foundering marriage. It all gets pretty crazy, of course, and everything has to go wrong before it goes right, but that's what makes it fun. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the script, and Barrymore has one of his best late-career comedy roles. 

Spotlight (2015)

SPOTLIGHT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tom McCarthy
    Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams,
    Liev Schreiber, Brian d'Arcy James, John Slattery, 
    Stanley Tucci, Jamey Sheridan, Elena Wohl,
    Neal Huff, Billy Crudup, Doug Murray, Len Cariou
Here's a movie that won't restore anybody's faith in the governing apparatus of the Catholic Church: a topical, fact-based thriller about the team of Boston Globe reporters who dug up the dirt on the clergy sex-abuse scandal around the turn of the millennium. It was a story many didn't want told, from the people in the pews up to the venerable and possibly criminal Cardinal Bernard Law, who allowed known and suspected pedophiles - a lot of them - to go on molesting children, by looking the other way and transferring them from place to place. "All the President's Men" remains the model for this kind of thing, and "Spotlight" takes a similar approach, revealing the details of a crime and its coverup by tracking the journalists as they try to hustle up enough solid information to crack the puzzle and tell the tale. Alan Pakula might've brought more artistry to the Watergate story, but the underlying issue here is just as disturbing, and the conspiracy to keep the facts under wraps is just as insidious and pervasive. As an ensemble acting piece, it's outstanding. To single anybody out would be difficult, not just because the actors are all that good, but because they're all perfectly cast. That includes veteran character actor Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, who resigned in Boston in the wake of the Globe report, only to be reassigned to an honorary post in Rome.

Murder At the Vanities (1934)

MURDER AT THE VANITIES  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mitchell Leisen
    Victor McLaglen, Jack Oakie, Carl Brisson,
    Kitty Carlisle, Dorothy Stickney, Gertrude Michael,
    Charles Middleton, Gail Patrick, Donald Meek
Pre-Code chorus girls in pre-Code costumes supply the eye candy in a pre-Code mystery about a backstage murder. Victor McLaglen plays the grinning detective charged with solving the case, if he can just keep his eyes off the girls in the show. Lucille Ball, Ann Sheridan and Alan Ladd are supposedly all in the chorus somewhere, but you'll really have to look to find them. Musical segments include a lively Duke Ellington number and Gertrude Michael's rendition of "Sweet Marijuana", a soulful ode to the combined allure of romantic longing and weed. 

Nightcrawler (2014)

NIGHTCRAWLER  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dan Gilroy
    Jake Gyllenhaal, Renee Russo,
    Bill Paxton, Riz Ahmed
Jake Gyllenhaal plays an enterprising small-time thief (and a guy without a lot of obvious social skills) who goes into business shooting grisly crime and accident footage and selling it to a bottom-feeding television producer played by Renee Russo. Through the course of his on-the-job training, Jake goes from observing and recording events to anticipating and even staging them, all to get the killer shot - a fire, a gun battle, a car wreck, a bloody corpse - that will lead off the morning news. (Enjoy your Cheerios, folks.) I know that "if it bleeds, it leads," but if this is the level broadcast news has arrived at, we're doomed, and Gyllenhaal's nerdy, mercenary, mad-eyed performance is truly creepy. A nightcrawler, for sure.

Picture Snatcher (1933)

PICTURE SNATCHER  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lloyd Bacon
    James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy, Patricia Ellis,
    Alice White, Ralf Harolde, Robert Emmett O'Connor
A lively, pre-Code Cagney vehicle about an ex-con who tries to go straight by becoming a tabloid newspaper reporter. His big break comes when he cons his way into Sing Sing and sneaks a photograph of a woman in the electric chair at the moment of her execution. Cagney's all giggling, mischievous energy in this, and his character's at least a distant ancestor of the hustling, predatory cameraman Jake Gyllenhaal played in "Nightcrawler". The story's based loosely on the guy who actually took that infamous photograph. Check out all the signs that decorate the newsroom.

The 100-Year-Old Man (2013)

THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D Felix Herngren
    Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg,
    Mia Skäringer, Jens Hultén, Bianca Cruzeiro, 
    Alan Ford, David Shackleton, Sven Lönn, 
    Georg Nikoloff, Simon Säppenen, Manuel Dubra
This movie starts out with an old man named Allan Karlsson exacting some payback on the fox who has just killed his pet tabby. The payback involves a few sticks of dynamite, which is more than enough to take out the fox, but it also lands Allan in an old folks' home, from which he escapes on his 100th birthday by doing what the title indicates, except that he doesn't exactly disappear. He catches a ride to the train station, buys a ticket to somewhere, and comes into the possession of a suitcase full of cash. He makes a few friends, and a bunch of skinhead gangsters want their suitcase back, and a police detective is after all of them, and there's an elephant. That's not all. In flashbacks you learn that Allan lost his parents at an early age, found he had a peculiar talent for blowing things up, and fought against the Fascists in Spain, where ironically he wound up saving the life of Francisco Franco. He helped Robert Oppenheimer solve a critical problem at Los Alamos, got drunk with Harry Truman the day President Roosevelt died, turned down a chance to dance with Josef Stalin, escaped from a Siberian gulag, and spent years passing worthless messages back and forth as a Cold War double agent. Like Leonard Zelig and Forrest Gump, Allan's an accidental everyman, turning up in the most unlikely places at absurdly historic moments, the difference being that Allan gets to work with high explosives. It takes some crazy luck to live to be 100, and Allan's personal supply appears to be infinite. If he were to climb out a window and disappear again at 105, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. 

Cahill: United States Marshall (1973)

CAHILL: UNITED STATES MARSHALL (1973)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrew V. McLaglen
    John Wayne, George Kennedy, Neville Brand,
    Gary Grimes, Clay O'Brien, Marie Windsor,
    Morgan Paull, Dan Vadis, Royal Dano, 
    Denver Pyle, Hank Worden, Harry Carey Jr.
One of John Wayne's late formula westerns, with the Duke as a widower laying down the law when his two young sons get involved in a bank robbery. It seems the old man spends way too much time out on the range tracking down bad guys, and not nearly enough at home minding the kids, and you get the idea Mrs. Green over at the boarding house would like to see more of him, too. George Kennedy overacts outrageously as the outlaw leader, but he does get to wear the movie's biggest and coolest hat. 

George Kennedy

(1925-2016)