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) ¢ ¢ ¢ 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)
¢
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) ¢ ¢ ¢ 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) ¢ ¢ ¢
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) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
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.
