The Blue Gardenia (1953)

THE BLUE GARDENIA  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fritz Lang
    Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, 
    Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, George Reeves
Anne Baxter goes on a date with Raymond Burr, gets drunk and ends up at his place. The next day he's dead and she can't remember a thing. The evidence suggests she killed him, but newspaper columnist Richard Conte's not so sure. The ending's kind of convenient, but up to that point, this is pretty good. The woman in the nightclub selling the blue gardenias is Celia Lovsky, who was married to Peter Lorre. Nat King Cole sings the title tune.

Spy Kids (2001)

SPY KIDS  (2001)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Rodriguez
    Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega,
    Daryl Sabara, Alan Cumming, Tony Shalhoub,
    Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, George Clooney
This is like a James Bond movie for eight-year-olds, about a retired spy couple (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) who go after a villain who's creating an army of child robots. When the villain takes the adults prisoner, it's up to their young son and daughter to rescue them. Alan Cumming's well-cast as a kids' show host named Floop, Pee-wee Herman being no longer an appropriate choice, I guess. Danny Trejo's "Machete" character, who would later bust heads (and sever them) in marginally more grownup movies, appears for the first time here as Antonio's inventive, tough-guy brother.  

Hotel Berlin (1945)

HOTEL BERLIN  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Godfrey
    Raymond Massey, Helmut Dantine, Faye Emerson,
    Peter Lorre, Andrea King, Alan Hale,
    George Colouris, Henry Daniell, Peter Whitney
"Hotel Berlin" is like "Grand Hotel" acted by supporting players instead of an A-list cast. It's from a novel by the same writer (Vicki Baum), and the setting again is a German luxury hotel. The war's drawing to a close now, and the Third Reich's brutal years in power and its imminent downfall affect everything. The movie was rushed through post-production because the producers feared the war would end before its release, and there's a sense of things being open-ended, issues not entirely resolved. The second-tier casting pays off, especially for the opportunity it gives Daniell as a soft-spoken aristocrat with a hand in everybody's story and an eye toward his own escape, and Lorre as a scientist crippled by guilt and cowering behind a curtain of cynicism, alcohol and cigarette smoke. 

Best of Enemies (2015)

BEST OF ENEMIES  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Morgan Neville, Robert Gordon
Like a lot of people who were around back then, I watched the television coverage of the 1968 political conventions with some interest. I was draft age and in college and there was a war on, to begin with. Everywhere you looked, culturally, racially, generationally, the country seemed to be cracking up. There were riots and assassinations to go with a lot of unfortunate rhetoric, and when the Democrats met in Chicago and the counterculture collided with Mayor Daley's cops, the '60s just kind of went kablooey. Apart from that, and a part of it, holding forth on ABC, were Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., hired by the network to provide commentary while the two major parties went through the motions of nominating candidates for president. Both men were brilliant, articulate, opinionated elitists. They disagreed on virtually everything. And they despised each other. Their televised debates were unprecedented and unforgettable. Whatever they contributed to the political discourse, they made for irresistible theater. That's what this documentary's about, and it's a fascinating look at a pivotal couple of weeks in the life of the country and the lives of its two protagonists. Who "won" the debates is a matter of dispute, but there's no doubt they reached some sort of dramatic climax in Chicago, when Vidal referred to Buckley as a "crypto-nazi," and Buckley responded by calling Vidal a "queer" and threatening to punch him in the face. What's startling watching it even now isn't Buckley's verbal assault, but the undisguised malice with which he delivers it, and this was going out live on TV. The exchange haunted both men for the rest of their lives, and the movie suggests that Buckley especially never recovered from it. That point seems arguable, but they both knew they'd shared a cultural moment that could never be repeated and neither could completely escape. I wouldn't want to bring back 1968 necessarily, but take a quick look at what passes for political commentary in some places today, and you can't help missing the level of intelligence, even mixed in with the low blows and vitriol, that these guys brought to the conversation.

The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date (1941)

THE LONE WOLF KEEPS A DATE  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sidney Salkow
    Warren William, Frances Robinson, Eric Blore,
    Bruce Bennett, Thurston Hall, Jed Prouty
Between the silent era and the late 1940s (according to our friends at Wikipedia), no fewer than ten different actors played the Lone Wolf, a.k.a. Michael Lanyard, a jewel thief/detective who first appeared in a novel published in 1914. The actor who took on the role most often was Warren William in a series of nine low-budget mysteries released by Columbia between 1940 and 1943. In this one, the Wolf has slipped off to a stamp collectors convention in Havana, where he gets involved in the case of a young man wrongly jailed for murder. It might be just a coincidence that Columbia was the studio of the Three Stooges, but there's a definite element of slapstick in this. William has a funny scene where he pretends to lose it over some self-inflicted damage to his stamp collection, but it's Eric Blore - Fred Astaire's loyal attendant in "Top Hat" - who gets most of the comic relief.

Queen To Play (2009)

QUEEN TO PLAY  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Caroline Bottaro
    Sandrine Bonnaire, Kevin Kline, Francis Renaud,
    Alexandra Gentil, Alice Pol, Jennifer Beals
A bored, middle-aged housekeeper (Sandrine Bonnaire) comes to life when she discovers she has a passion for chess and an unusual talent for playing it. Kevin Kline, speaking French, plays the reclusive doctor who teaches her the game, while her husband (Francis Renaud) struggles to keep his blue-collar job, and their daughter (Alexandra Gentil) struggles with growing up. The story itself is a little like a chess game, and Bottaro takes an interesting approach to the matches, pointing the camera at the faces of the players rather than the moves on the board. Filmed on the island of Corsica, and if this movie doesn't make you want to go there, nothing will.

Flashback: "Inserts"

Warning: The following review contains spoilers.

"The syphilitic perverts that are going to spend 
  money to see this film don't even know that 
  they have eyeballs."

  Richard Dreyfuss as the Boy Wonder

"It was your last shot, and you blew it."

  Bob Hoskins as Big Mac

"Tell me what are inserts."

  Jessica Harper as Cathy Cake

    The first time I saw "Inserts", I didn't like it very much.

    It was right around New Year's 1980 and I was hanging out with some friends in St. Louis, and one night we went to an art house to see a double feature - "Inserts" and "Last Tango In Paris". We were all dead tired. (Who knows? Maybe we'd been partying.) We made it through "Inserts" more or less intact, but after that, nobody had the stamina to take on two hours of a brooding Marlon Brando. So we left.
    About all I remember from that first screening is Richard Dreyfuss trying to get Jessica Harper to do a sex scene, and Dreyfuss at the end of the film playing the piano and singing. The movie as a whole didn't leave much of an impression. I was real tired. 
    "Inserts" first came out overseas in 1975 (the same year Dreyfuss made "Jaws"), and had its brief American run the following year. Of all the convention-rattling, proto-indie movies that slipped into theaters back then, it's hard to think of one that took more risks, or got more widely panned, dismissed, ignored and forgotten. Which is too bad, because, viewed again some 40 years later, it's an interesting little film, a funny and utterly perverse black comedy. 
    The story takes place around 1930. Dreyfuss plays a character called the Boy Wonder, a washed-up director of silent films, reduced to cranking out stag reels in his home, when he's not otherwise occupied drinking himself to death. And, oh yeah, he's impotent. Veronica Cartwright plays his leading lady, a sprightly hophead named Harlene. Stephen Davies plays the stud, a functional idiot known professionally as Rex the Wonder Dog. Bob Hoskins plays the producer, a gruff, unscrupulous bastard named Big Mac. Harper plays the producer's girlfriend, who's not nearly as innocent as anybody thinks. Her name - I'm not kidding - is Cathy Cake. 
    The producer stops by the set with his girlfriend on a day when the shooting is not going well. (You get a strong sense that for these people, the shooting never goes well.) The producer wants to make sure the work is getting done. The girlfriend wants to see what making movies is all about. The producer gives the junkie some dope and she promptly o.d.s on it, and after some requisite wrangling, Rex and Big Mac take Harlene out for a stealth burial, leaving Cathy Cake alone with the Boy Wonder, who now has no leading lady and a half-finished film. What's left to shoot, specifically, are the "inserts," the anatomical closeups that can later be spliced into the rest of the picture. "Miss Cake" doesn't know what inserts are at first. Then the director tells her. Then she volunteers to do them. 
    There's nothing especially likeable about these characters, though there's an obvious grudging affection between the Boy Wonder and Harlene. There's certainly nothing glamorous about what they're doing. They're all dreamers on the down side of the dream, working the edge between delusion and despair. 
    The Boy Wonder knows he's making crap for cretins, but he still can't help trying to make it artistic crap. He's a silent movie director in the age of sound, a has-been with bills piling up and nothing but time on his hands. He talks wistfully about dining with Griffith and Gish, but when a "new kid," a young actor named Clark Gable, comes around, the filmmaker gives him the brush. Gable wants to get him to direct a "real movie," but the Boy Wonder can't be bothered. Not when there's a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of cognac left in the house. His wonder days, his days of accomplishing anything at all, are over, and he's not going to get a second act. He's finished. Beneath a protective layer of sarcastic wit, he's not just scared. He's paralyzed. 
    The cheerfully strung-out Harlene is in the same boat, more or less. She's just found a different narcotic to deal with it. She was a familiar face in "real movies" a few years back. Cite some obscure bit she did for De Mille once, and she can tell you immediately what year. Miss Cake remembers seeing her on the big screen back in Chicago. Now she's waiting on tables and doing this. There's a running gag involving her "favorite necktie" that evolves into something truly morbid. 
    Of all of them, Rex is probably the most genuinely deluded, and the least equipped to know about it. He has an upcoming appointment at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a big shot from Metro who thinks he has "star potential" - a phony setup only he fails to recognize. He talks about having "a name in the funeral business," when he's really just a gravedigger at a nearby cemetery. His acting is beyond stiff, and he can't make a move without knocking something over or bumping into a wall. His "star potential" is probably being realized in this stuffy, depressing room. 
    Big Mac can see the future, and it's hamburgers. ("Big Mac" - get it?) The new freeways are going in - the Boy Wonder's house will be knocked down to make way for one - and Big Mac has visions of identical hamburger stands all up and down the road. He talks about producing "real movies," too, but whether he means that, or just sees it as a ticket into Miss Cake's pants, is hard to say. He's crude and amoral and ruthless. He might just get what he wants. 
    Miss Cake, with her big dark eyes and Kewpie-doll face, can play the little-girl act when it works to her advantage, and play against it, too. Calculating and observant, she's realistic about her chances of breaking into movies, but she wants to see and know everything, and she's willing to do anything to get what she wants. "Tell me what are inserts," she says, over and over, as Big Mac and the Boy Wonder dodge the question. Her willingness to go all the way, when it comes time to shoot them, takes even the Boy Wonder by surprise. She's more eager to perform than he thinks, and she turns the tables on him. 
    Whatever real or imagined glory might lie ahead or behind them, they've come together to make this squalid stag film. They're all sucking shit off the bottom of the pool, and they know it. They can see it in each other. They just can't admit it to themselves. 
    In fact, it's an open question whether there are any limits to how low they'd be willing to go. When Harlene turns up dead with a needle in her arm, Big Mac's only concern is how to get rid of the body, and the Boy Wonder seems perfectly willing to finish the picture by shooting the stud with the corpse. 
    Most high-end Hollywood movies dealing with the skin trade feel hollow at the core. Blame it on the commercial demand for an R rating. "The People vs. Larry Flynt", released 20 years ago, took its case all the way to the Supreme Court, on screen, at least, and still couldn't show its audience what it was supposed to be about. In the years since then, nothing much has changed. 
    "Inserts", made cheaply in England and rated X, gets closer to the subject than most. It's not hardcore, and that encounter late in the picture between Harper and Dreyfuss would play better in the context of the story if it were less discreet. When the two of them finally get it on, Richard doesn't even take his robe off, and when the climax comes, the whole point of a very long scene, it's done with a tight closeup of their faces. But for most of the picture, the language is graphic, the nudity is matter-of-fact, and the acrobatic humping Rex and Harlene engage in is frenzied, exuberant and wildly silly. Simulated or not, their commitment to their work is breathtaking. 
    It all plays out in real time, on a single set. The feeling is clammy and claustrophobic. You can practically smell the sweat the stale booze and cigarette smoke. It's L.A., so you know that outside the sun is shining, but you'd never know it here. The Boy Wonder never leaves the house. 
    The acting is uniformly fine, with a special nod to the fully frontal Veronica Cartwright, whose uninhibited performance boldly goes where few name actresses would dare to, then or now. Harper's character breaks loose, too, once she gets into it, and spends much of the picture's second half casually topless. By then it's become clear that what turns them all on, much more than sex, is film, and that's what the movie's really about. They talk a lot about "peaking," but nobody really peaks till the camera rolls. 
    When the producer leaves at the end, he takes the film with him. It's a cruel joke. He knows it's not what the director wanted to get, that even within the modest requirements of stag movies, it's an embarrassing failure. But as the opening credits make clear, those two or three minutes of faked intercourse, all mugging and thrashing in silent, scratched-up black and white, are going to be around to be viewed and laughed at long after all of them are gone. 
    It's the ultimate blessing and curse of the movies.
    Immortality has a price tag, after all.

INSERTS  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
Writer/Director: John Byrum
Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Boy Wonder)
          Jessica Harper (Cathy Cake)
          Veronica Cartwright (Harlene)
          Bob Hoskins (Big Mac)
          Stephen Davies (Rex the Wonder Dog)

Rated X. Contains nudity, language, drug use 
and lively, simulated sex.

"Better turn out the lights. 
  The bulbs are gonna burn out."
  Veronica Cartwright as Harlene

The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ernest B. Schoedsack
    Preston Foster, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Wilson,
    David Holt, Alan Hale, John Wood, Louis Calhern
Vesuvius erupts, and that's not a good thing for those who live in the shadow of the volcano. Also, there's Christ's crucifixion, and if you're wondering what's the connection between Golgotha and Pompeii, it's this: Hollywood. Basil Rathbone plays Pontius Pilate, who turns up in both places, or all three, if you count Hollywood. If you don't think Vesuvius was the work of an angry God, watch how many people get buried in the rubble immediately after they do something really bad. 

The Little Death (2014)

THE LITTLE DEATH  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Josh Lawson
    Josh Lawson, Bojana Novakovic, Kate Box,
    Damon Herriman, Tasneem Roc, Erin James,
    Patrick Brammall, Lachy Hulme, Lisa McCune,
    Ben Lawson, Kate Mulvany, T.J. Power
Five middle-class couples, all living in the same suburban neighborhood, struggle to come to terms with their secret sexual idiosyncrasies. What turns you on? Your partner sleeping? Your partner crying? Rape fantasies? Role playing? Telephone sex? They're all catalogued here in episodes that range from generally amusing to downright hilarious. Connecting all the stories (or at least turning up from time to time) is a single, middle-aged guy, a registered sex offender, who introduces himself to his new neighbors by baking them politically incorrect gingerbread men. The last segment, about a hearing-impaired video-telephone operator acting as an on-screen translator in the transaction between a phone-sex worker and her deaf client, is the best. The title comes from the French expression "le petit mort," meaning "orgasm." The ending puts a somewhat more literal spin on that. 

The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

THE MUMMY'S GHOST  (1944)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Reginald DeBorg
    Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Ramsay Ames,
    Robert Lowery, George Zucco, Barton MacLane
Chaney plays the mouldering mummy. Carradine plays the sinister priest who wants to bring a long-dead princess back to life. Recycled horror from Universal, okay for a sequel to a sequel to a sequel, but everything in it was done better with Boris Karloff in 1932. 

The Age of Adaline (2015)

THE AGE OF ADALINE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lee Toland Krieger
    Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford,
    Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker, Amanda Crew
A woman born in 1908 survives a car wreck in 1937, and from that point on stops aging. That has consequences, setting up a fantasy romance that could make you wonder how you'd deal with an imaginary situation in which everybody around you grows older and you don't. Like, what if that caused you to bail on a dashing young med student who 40 years later would be Harrison Ford? Bummer, huh? Now suppose your current boyfriend turns out to be the old one's kid. See? It gets complicated. Everything's resolved eventually, in a Hollywood-ending way, with the help of a dramatic coincidence - a literal bolt from the blue. Blake Lively does a nice job in the lead, and Ellen Burstyn, who plays Blake's elderly daughter - remember "Interstellar"? - appears to have cornered the market on children who age while their parents don't. 

Heaven's Gate (1980)

HEAVEN'S GATE  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Cimino
    Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken,
    Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston,
    Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Cotten, 
    Richard Masur, Geoffrey Lewis, Terry O'Quinn
Michael Cimino's epic western about the Johnson County War was notorious long before its 1980 release. The object of massive bad press even during filming, it was trashed by the critics, yanked from distribution, and drastically recut on its way to becoming Hollywood's most legendary box-office flop. Cimino's ambition going in was to create the "Gone 
With the Wind" of westerns. That he failed isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on how you feel about "Gone With the Wind". The director's own three-and-a-half-hour cut, viewed on a big screen, is an impressive piece of work, with echoes of "Doctor Zhivago", "The Godfather", "Days of Heaven" and maybe a little Eisenstein, while its depiction of prejudice and violence as part of the immigrant experience in 19th-century America prefigures "Gangs of New York". The deliberate pace takes some getting used to, a little more backstory on the relationship between the characters played by Walken and Kristofferson would've helped, and Walken's eye makeup can be kind of distracting. But Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is never less than stunning, and Cimino's wide-screen compositions look like paintings come to life. Whether "Heaven's Gate" could've made money under any circumstances is questionable. At the dawn of the Reagan era, folks weren't much interested in reexamining the greed, intolerance and slaughter that are as much a part of our frontier past as the heroics we like to romanticize. But for me, I'd rather spend 219 minutes of my life watching this again than hang out with Scarlett O'Hara any day.

Michael Cimino

(1939-2016)

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

STAR WARS EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS
    D: J.J. Abrams                                                        (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega,
    Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson,
    Carrie Fisher, Lupita Nyong'o, Max Von Sydow,
    Peter Mayhew, Andy Serkis, Mark Hamill
Or maybe you could call this one "The Search For Skywalker", because just about everybody in the galaxy appears to be out there trying to track down Master Luke. That includes a couple of old faces who haven't been seen around the franchise for decades, as well as a few new ones, the most welcome being Daisy Ridley as a feisty scavenger named Rey, who will be back in future "Star Wars" movies, unless the producers are completely crazy, and they're not. Abrams, who breathed new life into "Star Trek" a few years back, again combines nonstop action with an underlying affection for what's gone before, and it works. I'm not a huge fan of the "Star Wars" movies - I'm too old for them to be a part of my adolescent mythology - but as a cultural force - there's that word - they're sort of inevitable, and this is the best one yet. See if the part where General Hux addresses the assembled storm troopers doesn't remind you of "Triumph of the Will".