Paradise (1982)

PARADISE  (1982)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Stuart Gillard
    Phoebe Cates, Willie Aames, Tuvia Tavi
In 1923, a small caravan sets out from Baghdad, bound for Damascus. Along the way, it's attacked by bandits, but a teenaged boy and girl escape and make their way by camel to an idyllic spot on what's presumably the seacoast of Palestine. There they go native "Blue Lagoon"-style, skinny-dipping, playing house, frolicking with the monkeys and boning up on matters of anatomy. A dopey juvenile romance, in which the bandits conveniently disappear for long periods of time, so the kids can hang out and goof around in way fewer clothes than any fair-skinned sane person spending time in a desert would wear. Visual distractions include some spectacular location scenery and the memorably bare-bottomed Phoebe Cates.

The Quiet American (2002)

THE QUIET AMERICAN  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Phillip Noyce
    Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen
Michael Caine plays a British journalist working in Saigon in the early 1950s. Brendan Fraser's a medical aid worker newly arrived from the States. The French are losing the war, the Yanks are weighing their options, the Vietnamese are jockeying for position, and just to make things interesting, Fraser and Caine are in love with the same girl. Graham Greene wrote the novel this is based on, so there's a current of unease running through everything. People are not what they seem to be, necessarily, and you'd think a seasoned observer like Caine would be more suspicious of Fraser's real motives early on. But the sights and sounds, the beauty and even the air of Vietnam can be intoxicating, and the old newsman is no stranger to an opium pipe. There's not a lot of depth to what Fraser does here, or to his character, for that matter, but Caine, playing an aging romantic with a weary air of cynicism and sadness, gives one of his best performances. 

The Speed Kings (1913)

THE SPEED KINGS  (1913)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Wilfred Lucas
    Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Teddy Tetzlaff, 
    Barney Oldfield, Earl Cooper, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle
This looks like something where Mack Sennett said, "Hey, you guys, there's an auto race today. Why don't you take a camera out to the track and shoot a movie?" So they did.

On His Wedding Day (1913)

ON HIS WEDDING DAY  (1913)  ¢ ¢
    D: Mack Sennett
    Ford Sterling, Dot Farley, Nick Cogley,
    Hale Studebaker, Mabel Normand, Charles Avery
A lot can go wrong on the way to the altar.

Barney Oldfield's Race For a Life (1913)

BARNEY OLDFIELD'S RACE FOR A LIFE 
    D: Mack Sennett                              (1913)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Ford Sterling,
    Barney Oldfield, Raymond Hatton, Helen Holmes
Ford Sterling chains Mabel Normand to a railroad track and here comes a speeding train. Can Barney Oldfield drive a roadster fast enough to save her? You bet.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Guy Ritchie
    Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander,
    Elizabeth Debicki, Hugh Grant, Jared Harris
Guy Ritchie's slick, lively reboot of the '60s television show goes back to the beginning, with thief-turned-CIA op Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB psychopath Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) reluctantly teaming up to take on some affluent evildoers out to make a killing selling black market nukes to the highest bidder. It's nothing but style, really, but when style's done as smoothly as this, not much else matters. And it's a Guy Ritchie movie, so there's a flippant edge to the mayhem, like the scene where a Nazi war criminal finds himself strapped to his own malfunctioning electric chair. Cavill as Solo has Robert Vaughn's snaky charm without Vaughn's cold-eyed sneer, and Hammer brings a lethal unpredictability to Kuryakin. You never know when he's going to snap. You just know that when he does, it won't be good for somebody. Alicia Vikander, the eye-catching android in "Ex Machina" and an Oscar winner for "The Danish Girl", plays the bomb-builder's daughter, who's also East Germany's best auto mechanic, as well as somebody who can hold her own in a high-speed chase and a wrestling match with Kuryakin. By the time the end credits roll, they're all in place for a sequel, maybe a few of them, and for once, a sequel might actually be worth looking forward to, assuming Ritchie stays at the helm, and Hugh Grant returns as everybody's favorite Uncle.

Too Late Blues (1962)

TOO LATE BLUES  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Cassavetes
    Bobby Darin, Stella Stevens, Everett Chambers,
    Nick Dennis, Vincent Edwards, Rupert Crosse
John Cassavetes actually got some studio backing to make this movie, after the critical response to his first independent feature, "Shadows", in 1961. It's about the ups and downs of a young jazz musician (Bobby Darin) who wants to make it big without selling out. (He'd better not hold his breath waiting for that to happen.) Stella Stevens plays a floozy with a voice like a theremin, and in what's easily the film's craziest shot, you see Stevens' face in a restroom sink, in tight closeup, from the drain's point of view. It's like a B-side variation on "The Hustler" - a lot of it takes place in a pool hall - with memorable performances by Stevens and Everett Chambers as a hustling, lowlife agent. David Raksin wrote the musical score, and Shelly Manne, Benny Carter and Red Mitchell are some of the jazz artists who turn up on the soundtrack, if not on the screen.

Where To Invade Next (2015)

WHERE TO INVADE NEXT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Moore
Look out, America. Puck is back. In his latest comic broadside, Michael Moore takes aim at American exceptionalism, the notion favored by some patriotic citizens that not only are we different from every other country on earth, we're also way better, and so much smarter that we can't possibly learn anything from anybody else. So Moore, with his shaggy hair, baseball cap, oversized field jacket and a large American flag, crosses the Atlantic to single-handedly invade countries whose backward people are doing things in a way we're not. He freely admits he's cherry-picking his spots. As he puts it, "My mission is to pick the flowers, not the weeds." So he travels to Italy, where an average worker can get up to eight weeks paid vacation and lunch breaks are two hours long. To Slovenia, one of several countries where a college education is free. To France, where a school lunch resembles actual food, and what kids learn in sex ed teaches them something positive about sex. (Leave it to the French.) To Tunisia, where women demanded and got an equal rights amendment voted into the country's constitution. Moore's presence can be overbearing - he wouldn't be Michael Moore otherwise - but as always, he makes his point. It might be a utopian vision of what other nations have accomplished, but you can't help wondering how much healthier and happier we'd be if we could just do some of that stuff here. We're paying a price for our exceptionalism. We see that every day. We can do better. We've got a lot to learn. 

Desert Island Partners

Movies would still exist if these actors hadn't teamed up, but somehow they wouldn't be the same.

                  Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
                  Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi
                  Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas
                  Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
                  Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor
                  Paul Newman and Robert Redford
                  Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau
                  Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre
                  Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones
                  Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

Tommy (1975)

TOMMY  (1975)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ken Russell
    Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Roger Daltry,
    Jack Nicholson, Robert Powell, Keith Moon
Pete Townshend's groundbreaking rock opera about childhood trauma and pinball wizardry, brought to the screen as only Ken Russell could imagine it: extravagant, relentlessly busy and a little bit tedious. Hallucinogens might help. Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Elton John and, of course, the Who are some of the musical artists on hand, and even Jack Nicholson sings a little, but the part you're least likely to forget, with or without the hallucinogens, involves Ann-Margret and an ocean of baked beans. 

Grandma (2015)

GRANDMA  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paul Weitz
    Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner, Marcia Gay Harden,
    Judy greer, Elizabeth Peña, Sam Elliott
It's early yet as this movie begins, and already Elle Reid's day is not going well. First off, she breaks up with her lover of four months. It's not an amicable split, and Elle's behavior is horrible. Not long after that, Elle's granddaughter Sage shows up at her door, needing $600 immediately for an abortion. That wouldn't be a problem, except that Elle's broke, having cut up all of her credit cards and turned them into a wind chime. (Elle's career as a poet and sometime academic has not resulted in affluence, to say the least.) Elle agrees to help, though, so she and Sage pile into her Eisenhower-era Dodge, which (of course) won't start. And so it goes. Elle's played by Lily Tomlin, and one of the things that makes her interesting to watch is that she doesn't even try to be likeable. In fact, she's about as warm and fuzzy as Bill Murray's title character in "St. Vincent" (a movie this one resembles), except that where Vincent appeared to not give a shit, Elle is emphatically pissed off, at her luck, her life, herself and everybody around her, and it's made her mean. She's a good person, though she'd deny that. She's just not very nice. She's got a heart, but you could look a long time and not find it. She's a bitch on wheels, except when the Dodge won't start, and then she's a bitch without them. What it adds up to is that this is the best role Tomlin has had in ages, in a picture that's hard to imagine without her. (Weitz wrote the script with Tomlin in mind.) It makes a point without being too preachy, and hits the right emotional chords without being too cute, at least most of the time. It's funny, besides, and Tomlin's performance has everything to do with that. One other thing: If grandma tells you to take care of your teeth - and this one will, over and over - you'd better just do what she says. She's not kidding about that. And this is one bad-ass grandma.

When We Were Kings (1996)

WHEN WE WERE KINGS  (1996)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
   D: Leon Gast
An Oscar-winning documentary about the "Rumble In the Jungle", the heavyweight title fight in 1974 between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Mostly it's a time-capsule portrait of Ali, then in the autumn of a great career, psyching Foreman out, psyching himself up, jabbing and sparring with reporters, and mugging for every available camera. The bout in Zaire, which Ali won, would affect both fighters profoundly. Foreman was devastated, went into years of depression, eventually reinvented himself and incredibly won back the title, or some part of it, in his 40s. Ali, who introduced the "rope-a-dope" against Foreman, proved he could win a fight by getting hit - a lot - a strategy that arguably extended his career while contributing to the Parkinson's symptoms that would later debilitate him. The movie recalls a time when the world was younger, when George Plimpton and Norman Mailer were middle-aged journalists covering the fight, not old men remembering it, when the sheer force of Ali's personality reduced everybody around him, even Foreman, to supporting roles. It recalls a time that some of us remember, when all the world was Ali's stage, and Muhammad was the prince of players. 

Muhammad Ali

(1942-2016)

It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955)

IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA  (1955)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Gordon
    Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis, 
    Ian Keith, Chuck Griffiths, Dean Maddox Jr. 
Hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific leads to a mutant species of octopus growing really, really big. Good thing Navy commander and ace monster fighter Kenneth Tobey is on the job. Decently made '50s sic-fi with impressive Ray Harryhausen effects. Even the octopus out-acts Faith Domergue in this, and the scene where she and Ken have a heart-to-heart talk while fondling test tubes is amusing in a Freudian sort of way.