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)