8 Mile (2002)

8 MILE  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Curtis Hanson
    Eminem, Kim Basinger, Brittany Murphy,
    Mekhi Phifer, Evan Jones, Eugene Byrd,
    Anthony Mackie, Taryn Manning, Michael Shannon

Brothahs and sistahs, it's your main man Nick,
Gonna spin a little rap about this here flick. 
It's all about a white kid in Detroit City,
Got a dead-end job and his life is lookin' shitty.
He lives in a trailer park and that's no good,
So he hangs with the homies at a club in the 'hood.
He might  be a honky, but he knows the lingo.
His mother (Kim Basinger) likes to play bingo.
Now the cat's big dream is to be a star rapper.
If he can't cut that, then his future's in the crapper.
So he gets on stage where he freezes and chokes,
And the folks in the audience laugh and make jokes. 
Then he goes through all kinds of toil and trouble.
Gonna take more than ridicule to bust his bubble. 
And after watchin' lots of real bad shit pass,
He picks up the mike again and really kicks ass.
By now you've prob'ly guessed that this is Eminem's movie.
In the language of the '60s you could call it kinda groovy.
The story's pretty basic and you've seen it all before,
But this Marshall Mathers kid really nails it to the door.
He plays it low-key, a kind of hip-hop zen.
Makes you wonder what he'll do when he gets to mile ten.

In the spirit of the New Year and as a gift to the rest of the human race, the Movie Buzzard resolves not to try to write any more rap lyrics for the foreseeable future. 

Black Sabbath (1963)

BLACK SABBATH  (1963)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mario Bava
    Boris Karloff, Mark Damon, Michèle Mercier,
    Lidia Alfonsi, Susy Andersen, Jacqueline Pierreux
Three tales of the supernatural, introduced by (who else?) Boris Karloff, which is a little like watching three episodes of Karloff's old "Thriller" television show. In the first segment, a nurse steals a ring from the finger of a corpse, and lives (but not long) to regret it. The second has a woman terrorized by a voice on the telephone. The third is a vampire story starring Boris himself. Ironically, that one's the least frightening. The first is the shortest and the best. 

Men In Black 3 (2012)

MEN IN BLACK 3  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Barry Sonnenfeld
    Will Smith, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Eve,
    Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Thompson
The guys in the black suits are back, with Agent J (Will Smith) going back in time to 1969 to save the world, as well as the life of his surly partner, Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). Josh Brolin plays the younger Agent K, and it's brilliant casting, while the premise allows for a revelation at the end that opens a whole new window on the relationship between the two agents. The rest is the usual summertime blast of special effects, with a new icky creature being blown to pieces every so often to hold the attention of viewers who really aren't interested in anything else. My favorite: the giant mutant fish thing that tries to devour Agent J.

The Woman In White (1948)

THE WOMAN IN WHITE  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Godfrey
    Eleanor Parker, Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet,
    Gig Young, Agnes Moorehead, John Abbott
A movie based on the Wilkie Collins novel about a mysterious woman who seems to hold the key to a plot that involves blackmail, larceny, mistaken identity and murder. My colleague Ms. Applebaum has read the book and says the film departs from it in significant ways, but the movie holds up fine on its own. Sydney Greenstreet as the treacherous Count Fosco is one of the most sinister villains ever, but his wife is played by Agnes Moorehead, which at least makes it a fair fight. 

Bad Santa (2003)

BAD SANTA  (2003)  ¢ ¢
    D: Terry Zwigoff
    Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Bernie Mac,
    Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, John Ritter
What if you took your kid to the store to see Santa Claus, and Santa turned out to be a mean, belligerent, foul-mouthed, antisocial, smelly, womanizing, safe-cracking, alcoholic bum? That's the joke in this sour, one-joke comedy, a shot of vitriol to counter the annual onslaught of holiday cheer. Santa gets drunk. Santa chain-smokes cigarettes. Santa stumbles around and acts like an asshole and uses words like "shit" and "fuck" in every goddamn sentence, and after a while you kind of get numb to it all. There's a nice payoff late in the film, though, if you make it that far. It happens when Santa, on the run from the cops after a botched burglary, gets gunned down trying to deliver a little stuffed elephant to the only kid on his Christmas list. Now that's funny. I realize I just gave away the ending, but trust me, you're not going to have enough invested in this guy to care want happens to him anyway. Merry Christmas.

Screen Test / Take 10

Match the following actresses with the movies in which they played opposite Cary Grant:

                              1. Ingrid Bergman
                              2. Grace Kelly
                              3. Sophia Loren
                              4. Eva Marie Saint
                              5. Mae West
                              6. Leslie Caron
                              7. Deborah Kerr
                              8. Doris Day
                              9. Marlene Dietrich
                            10. Marilyn Monroe

                              a. "That Touch of Mink"
                              b. "I'm No Angel"
                              c. "An Affair To Remember"
                              d. "Notorious"
                              e. "Father Goose"
                               f. "To Catch a Thief"
                              g. "Monkey Business"
                              h. "Blonde Venus"
                               i. "Houseboat"
                               j. "North By Northwest"

        Answers:

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

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

THE GRAPES OF WRATH  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Ford
    Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine,
    Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon, Russell Simpson,
    John Qualen, Eddie Quillen, Darryl Hickman,
    Ward Bond, Charles Middleton, Mae Marsh
John Steinbeck's epic story about a family of Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl for the promise of a better life in California, brought to the screen by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as proletarian hero Tom Joad. Movies don't get much more American than that.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)

THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS 
    D: Pare Lorentz                     (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
The irony in that title is in the use of the word "broke". A landmark documentary about how we created the Dust Bowl by turning over millions of acres of grassland (in a region that didn't get much rain) for the mass production of wheat. You'd expect a movie produced for the New Deal to end on a note of hope. Most of them do. This one doesn't, and I'm not sure it could. At the time of its release, farmers on the plains were still going broke, the land was still blowing away, and the Okies in their jalopies were still on the road heading west, the exodus in progress. You can bet John Ford watched this movie a time or two before he went to work on "The Grapes of Wrath".

The River (1938)

THE RIVER  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pare Lorentz
A Depression-Era documentary about the Mississippi River as both a magnificent resource and a mechanism for catastrophe. Or what happens when you log all the trees off the hills, and it rains, and the rain with nothing to stop it runs down to the river on its way to the sea. The narrative's repetitive and relentless. There's an inevitability about the way the words tumble over each other and double back to tumble over each other again that reflects the cycles of nature. The things we control and those we can't. The horrific collision of weather, erosion and greed. Stuff we ignore at our peril. 

The Great Flood (2012)

THE GREAT FLOOD  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Morrison
It might not have matched the scale of Noah's Ark, but for those who were caught up in it, the flood that devastated the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1927 was epic enough. More than 23,000 square miles of land ended up under water. A million people were displaced. Buster Keaton even changed the climax in "Steamboat Bill Jr." from a flood to a windstorm because of it. This movie is no Ken Burns-style history of the flood. It's an artful impression of what all that water did to the houses, farms, towns and lives that stood in its path. The footage is entirely archival, and some of the images have all but disintegrated, creating an eerie sense of time passing, memory fading, a cataclysmic event slipping away into history, the record forever imperfect and incomplete. There's no narration. No witnesses. No talking heads. Just a few chapter titles and a jazz score by Bill Frisell. The music's anachronistic, but it works. References to Jerome Kern's "Old Man River" come and go throughout. Parallels to Hurricane Katrina and the recent disasters in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico are inescapable. 

Bright Eyes (1934)

BRIGHT EYES  (1934) ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Butler
    Shirley Temple, James Dunn, Judith Allen,
    Jane Withers, Lois Wilson, Charles Sellon
Shirley Temple sings "On the Good Ship Lollipop". What else do you need to know?

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Antoine Fuqua
    Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke,
    Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-Hun Lee, Haley Bennett,
    Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard
Seven dudes with guns (and knives and arrows and hairpins and dynamite) take on a mercenary army under the command of an asshole millionaire played with unalloyed nastiness by Peter Sarsgaard. This might not match the artistry of its original source (Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai"), or the collective star power of the 1960 John Sturges film, but it's an exciting, action-packed, morally unambiguous western, a point in favor of the argument that not all remakes are a bad thing. Nobody had heard of a spaghetti western when Sturges made his "Magnificent Seven", and this version contains conspicuous references to "A Fistful of Dollars" and "High Plains Drifter", among others. Denzel Washington has the old Yul Brynner role, and he's gotta be the coolest cat on the frontier, an African-American paladin in an all-black getup on a shiny black horse. He's the leader, of course, but your attention keeps being diverted to the gang's other members, especially Ethan Hawke, Chris Pratt and Byung-Hun Lee. That happens in the Sturges movie, too, with Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve McQueen. James Horner composed the musical score - his last - and Elmer Bernstein's iconic title theme from 1960 breaks out at the end, because, you know, you couldn't remake "The Magnificent Seven" without it, really.

A Night At the Opera (1935)

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA  (1935)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Wood
    The Marx Brothers, Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones,
    Margaret Dumont, Walter King, Sigfried Ruman
Groucho, Harpo and Chico tear up the opera word. The Marx Brothers' first movie at MGM, and the only picture they made there that comes close to their earlier work at Paramount. The stateroom scene is legendary.

Trumbo (2015)

TRUMBO  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Roach
    Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Michael Stuhlbarg,
    Helen Mirren, David James Elliott, Alan Tudyk,
    Dean O'Gorman, Christian Berkel, Louis C.K.
As this movie opens, it's 1947 and Dalton Trumbo's in Louis B. Mayer's office signing a contract making him the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Trumbo's left-wing politics are no secret, but this is America, and he's living the good life in sunny California with a house on a lake, three nice kids, a wife played by Diane Lane and an infinite supply of booze and cigarettes. What could go wrong? A lot, of course. The Red Scare is getting into gear, and it's not long before Trumbo's being trashed in the press, called before Congress, and hauled off to prison for holding and expressing unpopular views. That's America, too, sometimes. The rest of the movie is Trumbo against the blacklist, but there are other players involved, actors, directors and fellow writers, all doing whatever they can to get through a terrible time, if not with honor, then at least with their families, lives and careers intact. Bryan Cranston plays Trumbo, blunt, caustic, literate and self-righteous, a pain in the neck to live with and an annoyance even to those who support his cause. Helen Mirren does a venomous bit as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and John Goodman steals a scene or two as a poverty-row producer who hires Trumbo to write shit screenplays under numerous fake names. How Cranston managed to dodge cancer and emphysema while smoking his way through this is anybody's guess. 

Black Moon (1934)

BLACK MOON  (1934)  ¢ ¢
    D: Roy William Neill
    Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess,
    Cora Sue Collins, Arnold Korff, Clarence Muse
A handful of white folks who probably shouldn't be on this Caribbean island to begin with try to survive long enough to make their escape when a horde of black natives lay some voodoo on them. One of the white women has gone native herself and keeps sneaking off at night to dance to the jungle drums. I'm not sure that's gonna help.

The High Sun (2015)

THE HIGH SUN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Dalibor Matanic
    Tihana Lazovic, Goran Markovic, Nives Ivankovic,
    Stipe Radoja, Trpimir Turkic, Slavko Sobin
Love among the ruins. Three Balkan love stories set in three different decades, with the same actors playing different roles in each. All three stories center on the relationship between a Croat and a Serb, and all are influenced (and to some extent damned) by recent Balkan history, the lovers united by their grudging humanity and ripped apart by wounds too deep to heal. Love won't conquer all, but it won't stop trying, either, and I guess there's hope in that. It's not much, but it's something. The fact that most viewers outside the Balkans won't even know who's a Serb and who's a Croat only reinforces the underlying tragedy.

The Vagabond Lover (1929)

THE VAGABOND LOVER  (1929)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Marshall Neilan
    Rudy Vallee, Sally Blaine, Marie Dressler,
    Charles Sellon, Nella Walker, Danny O'Shea
A musical from the early sound era, made to cash in on the popularity of radio crooner Rudy Vallee, about a group of young musicians who crash a high-society benefit by posing as a famous jazz band. Vallee's facility with dialogue would get sharper as time went on. Starting with his performance in this film, it had to. He does better at singing, of course, and Sally Blaine in the female lead could melt a few hearts, but it's Marie Dressler as a dithering matron who chews up the soundstage and steals the show. The movie's slight, but fun.

One More Time (2015)

ONE MORE TIME  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Edwards
    Christopher Walken, Amber Heard, Kelli Garner,
    Hamish Linklater, Ann Magnuson, Oliver Platt
Christopher Walken, dialing the weirdness back a notch, stars as Paul Lombard, a crooner who used to pack 'em in, but whose glory days are long gone. Amber Heard plays his daughter Jude, an aspiring musician who desperately wants to make it on her own and can't stand living in the old man's overbearing shadow. Kelli Garner plays Corinne, the other daughter, the responsible one, "the one who can't sing," whose mercenary pragmatism comes through in a big way for all of them. Hamish Linklater plays Corinne's husband Tim, who once had an affair with Jude, who's also slept with her therapist, her agent, and who knows how many other guys. For the moment, the whole family's hanging out at Paul's house in the Hamptons, talking at, over and through each other, the way people who've known each other too long and too well sometimes do. There are a couple moments of high drama, but what really counts here are the day-to-day interactions between the various players, and the grudging affection that underlies all the sniping and complaining they do. They're not perfect - far from it - but they try, and there's a kind of nobility in that. Besides, as Katharine Hepburn put it in "The Lion In Winter", "What family doesn't have its ups and downs?"

Woodstock (1970)

WOODSTOCK  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Wadleigh
Hippies, pot, bad acid, Richie Havens, Canned Heat, Crosby, Stills & Nash, rain, mud, Joan Baez, The Who, Sha Na Na, dancing, skinny-dipping, yoga, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Country Joe & the Fish, telephones, garbage, more pot, Arlo, Janis, Jimi, Sly & the Family Stone, helicopters, traffic jams, babies, portable toilets, Wavy Gravy, Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia and more pot. An Oscar-winning documentary about an indelible cultural moment - the now-legendary three-day music festival held in 1969 in Upstate New York, where a who's who of period rock-&-roll acts serenaded a crowd estimated at half a million people. The restored director's cut runs four hours, including an "interfuckingmission," and if you watch the whole thing straight through, you could feel like you survived the festival yourself. A title at the end scrolls through the names of counterculture figures who have died since the festival took place. It's a long list, and growing.

Jackie (2016)

JACKIE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pablo Larraín
    Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig,
    Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant,
    Caspar Phillipson, John Carroll Lynch, Beth Grant,
    Max Casella, Corey Johnson, Aidan O'Hare
Natalie Portman plays Jacqueline Kennedy in the days immediately following the assassination of JFK, in a movie that's not incoherent exactly, but always a little sketchy around the edges. It's like one of those reenactments created for the History Channel: a reasonable facsimile that never quite captures the look or feel of the real thing. There are times, especially in profile, when Portman comes close to resembling Jackie. More often, she looks like the younger sister of Kristin Scott Thomas. Peter Sarsgaard is good as Bobby Kennedy, but you'd never look at him and think, there's Bobby Kennedy. Caspar Phillips0n is a dead ringer (bad choice of words) for JFK, but this is Jackie's movie, and Jack's on the periphery. The picture goes out of its way not to deify Jackie. In the aftermath of Dallas, she's a basket case (who wouldn't be?), but she can also be cold and manipulative, spoiled and temperamental, wounded and indecisive, depending on which way the fates are knocking her around. Talking to a journalist (Billy Crudup) and determined to shape her husband's legacy while she can, she's a chain-smoking bitch. Leading Charles Collingwood on a televised tour of the White House, she's all staged, whispering charm. I don't know how close any of this gets to the real Jackie, but one thing's certain. She was a lot more complex and emotionally volatile than the elegant, carefully composed images we saw during her time in the White House, on the magazine covers and on TV.

Movie Star Moment: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch
in "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)

   If there was ever a case of perfect typecasting in a movie, it was Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the Depression-Era Southern lawyer in "To Kill a Mockingbird". I'm sure other actors could've done it, but for most of us, when you think of Atticus Finch, you think of Gregory Peck. It's like Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler, or Henry Fonda playing Tom Joad. Why would you want anybody else?
    In this scene, it's night and Atticus has gone out into the backwoods of Alabama to tell the parents of Tom Robinson their son is dead. Tom's a young black man Atticus has been defending on a bogus rape charge, and he's been shot while in police custody, trying to escape. While Atticus is in the house, the rape victim's father, a man named Bob Ewell, turns up and demands to see him. Ewell is played by the character actor James Anderson. Atticus comes out and walks up to where Ewell is standing. The two stare into each other for a moment, and then in an act of undisguised hatred, Anderson spits in Peck's face. Atticus moves as if he's about to strike back, and then he pauses, checks himself, and very deliberately takes out a handkerchief and in one dismissive motion, wipes the insult away. His eyes never leave Ewell, and he never says a word. He walks past Ewell to the car where his nine-year-old son is waiting, and as he does, he throws the handkerchief in the dirt, leaving it. The gesture makes its point in no uncertain terms. It's direct. It's simple. It packs a dramatic punch, and a moral one. In the context of the scene, the story, and the whole twisted history of the South, it's absolutely the right thing for Atticus to do. 
    That's Atticus Finch. That's Gregory Peck.

Topper Returns (1941)

TOPPER RETURNS  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roy Del Ruth
    Roland Young, Joan Blondell, Carole Landis,
    Billie Burke, Dennis O'Keefe, Patsy Kelly,
    George Zucco, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson
A comic mystery with Roland Young again playing Cosmo Topper, the staid, straight-laced banker bedeviled by spirits. Joan Blondell's a newly minted ghost who enlists Topper's help to find out who done her in. It's the third entry in the series, and George and Marian Kirby, the ghosts played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in the original "Topper" film, aren't around anymore. The movie kind of misses their spectral presence, but it's not bad, with enough suspicious characters to keep you guessing about who stuck a knife in poor Joan.

Holy Motors (2012)

HOLY MOTORS  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Leos Carax
    Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes,
    Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson
A well-to-do businessman gets into a stretch limo and sets out to keep a series of appointments. That much of the movie is simple. It's in the nature of the appointments that things get strange. Real strange. The appointments take place all over Paris, and it's never entirely clear what they're supposed to signify, or what's going on. But you never know what to expect in them, either, any more than you could predict the course of a dream. There's a direct reference to Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face" in the casting of Edith Scob as the limousine driver, and, this being a Leos Carax film, the guy keeping all the appointments is Denis Lavant. 

Song of Love (1947)

SONG OF LOVE  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clarence Brown
    Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, Robert Walker,
    Henry Daniell, Else Janssen, Leo G. Carroll
An admittedly fanciful musical biopic in which Johannes Brahms moves in with Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, their beleaguered housekeeper and their seven kids. Robert and Clara are eternally devoted to each other, but then Brahms falls for Clara, and she kind of likes him, too. Some longing looks are exchanged, but that's as far as it goes, and much beautiful music gets made. Hepburn doesn't actually play the piano in this, but she makes it look convincing. Her fingers appear to be hitting the right keys, and her hands are flying. Henry Daniell, for whom the word "reserved" was probably invented, gives one of his more animated performances as the caustic, grandstanding Franz Liszt.

Rules Don't Apply (2016)

RULES DON'T APPLY  (2016)  ¢ ¢
    D: Warren Beatty
    Warren Beatty, Alden Ehrenreich, Lily Collins,
    Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Martin Sheen,
    Hart Bochner, Paul Sorvino, Annette Bening,
    Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan
It took decades for Warren Beatty to get his Howard Hughes movie made, and here it finally is, with Beatty as the famously eccentric billionaire. It's nice to look at (Caleb Deschanel did the cinematography) and a lot of famous faces turn up in fairly small roles, but the script is devoid of surprises and the picture never really comes to life. Beatty doesn't even make Hughes all that interesting, and Hughes was one of the 20th century's preeminent oddballs. It plays like a long, slow movie from another time, and you keep waiting for something to happen that could keep you from glancing at your watch, but it doesn't. It just goes on, and on, and on. Beatty's co-writer, Bo Goldman, wrote the screenplay for "Melvin and Howard", a 1980 movie (and a better one) in which Jason Robards played Hughes.

When a Man Loves (1927)

WHEN A MAN LOVES  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alan Crosland
    John Barrymore, Dolores Costello, Warner Oland,
    Sam De Grasse, Holmes Herbert, Stuart Holmes
An opulent costume romance set in 18th-century France, with Barrymore as an aspiring man of the cloth and Dolores Costello as a woman who makes his commitment to chastity somewhat difficult. Also, there's treachery and sword fighting and cheating at cards and a revolt aboard a prison ship. (Criminals considered too wicked for French prisons in this film face an even more horrible fate: deportation to Louisiana.) Swashbuckling takes over toward the end, and Barrymore gets manic in the action scenes.

Spy Kids: All the Time In the World (2011)

SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD  (2011)
   D: Robert Rodriguez                                                    ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Jessica Alba, Rowan Blanchard, Mason Cook,
    Joel McHale, Jeremy Piven, Alexa Vega
"Spy Kids 4", in case you're keeping score, or maybe "Spy Kids: The Next Generation", with our preteen agents taking on a villain called the Timekeeper, who wants to slow down time till it stops, messing things up for everybody. The younger spy kid - the boy - is hearing-impaired, which comes in handy as the plot unfolds. The older kid - the girl - is just annoying. Ricky Gervais gets most of the good lines as the voice of a wise-cracking robot dog. Danny Trejo's Machete character appears for a second or two, frozen in time. 

The Mummy (1959)

THE MUMMY  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Terence Fisher
    Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Yvonne Furneaux,
    Eddie Byrne, Felix Aylmer, Raymond Huntley
Hammer horror starring Peter Cushing as an archeologist with a bum leg and Christopher Lee as the reanimated corpse of an ancient Egyptian high priest. Formula monster stuff with some decent production values. Where all that green light inside the tomb comes from is a mystery known only to Hammer. It looks kind of cool, though. Maybe we're not supposed to ask. Lee, wrapped head to toe in bandages, acts mostly with his eyes.

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

HANDS OF THE RIPPER  (1971)  ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Sasdy
    Eric Porter, Angharad Rees, Jane Merrow,
    Keith Bell, Derek Godfrey, Margaret Rawlings
Jack the Ripper's daughter survives a traumatic childhood (go figure) and grows up damaged, with homicidal tendencies of her own. I watched this with my colleague Ms. Applebaum, who heroically sat through it to the end, and noted that it's a horror movie without a true villain. It's also short on reasons for the audience to stay awake. (Ms. A can testify to that, too.) The Hammer studio produced.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN  (1957)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Terence Fisher
    Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Hazel Court,
    Robert Urquhart, Valerie Gaunt, Noel Hood
Peter Cushing plays the mad doctor, with Christopher Lee as "The Creature", a lumbering giant stitched together with body parts picked up wherever the doc can find them. It's too much talk and not enough monster, but Lee finds a note of pathos in the Creature under all the grotesque makeup. Over the next 20 years, Britain's Hammer studio would become synonymous with horror in much the same way that Universal had been in the '30s and '40s. "The Curse of Frankenstein" was the first dance in a long-running monster's ball.

Wanda Nevada (1979)

WANDA NEVADA  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Fonda
    Peter Fonda, Brooke Shields, Luke Askew,
    Fiona Lewis, Ted Markland, Paul Fix,
    Severn Darden, Bert Williams, Henry Fonda
A gambler wins a girl in a poker game and the two of them hit the road in his Studebaker. A series of adventures leads them to the Grand Canyon, where they trade the car for some pack animals and go off on a search for gold. A crazy-ass, shaggy-dog western with some bits of magic realism, a few random acts of brutality, and a somewhat casual attitude toward the fact that its leading lady is seriously underaged. It helps a lot that as the playful, bickering relationship between Fonda and Shields becomes more affectionate, it stays platonic. She's as irritating as only a 13-year-old can be, and he's clearly not interested in her sexually. (When they cross paths with an attractive photographer who's about Fonda's age, it's a different story.) Henry Fonda does an eccentric cameo as a goggle-eyed prospector - the only time he and Peter appeared together on screen - and the motel clerk who gives Peter a hard time is Teri Shields, Brooke's mother.

Older Than Ireland (2015)

OLDER THAN IRELAND  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alex Fegan
Irish folks who have lived to be 100 or more talk about life, love, dreams, accomplishments, adventures, regrets, death and the afterlife. Some are old enough to remember the Easter Rebellion, which makes you wish they'd been asked more questions about the history they've lived through. Their personal stories are history, too, of course, and the movie's content to stand back and let them tell their tales. It's all beautifully edited and shot, combining the testimony of its ancient witnesses with a point-blank physical appraisal of what a century looks like. From the blind, toothless, bedridden man of 108, to the sharp-tongued 104-year-old who's clearly not ready to swear off cigarettes, to Ireland's oldest citizen, who looks like she could still kick ass at 113, they're a variably spry and feisty bunch. The rest of us, if we're doomed to live that long, should be so lucky. 

Soldier In the Rain (1963)

SOLDIER IN THE RAIN  (1963)  ¢ ¢
    D: Ralph Nelson
    Steve McQueen, Jackie Gleason, Tuesday Weld,
    Tony Bill, Tom Poston, Ed Nelson, Lew Gallo
An ill-conceived service comedy with Steve McQueen as a hustling supply sergeant whose get-rich-quick schemes go awry before the go anywhere, and Jackie Gleason as the senior NCO who keeps bailing him out. McQueen goes against type playing a hick, and Gleason's bulk looks out of place in an Army uniform. Both are underserved by the script. Unexpected highlight: the odd-couple pairing of Gleason and Tuesday Weld, when McQueen sets them up on a date. 

Money Monster (2016)

MONEY MONSTER  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jodie Foster
    George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell,
    Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito
A good escapist thriller about what happens when a guy with a gun and a bomb hijacks a television show hosted by an investment hustler played by George Clooney. It seems the bomber  sank his life savings  - his mother's entire estate - in a stock Clooney's character talked up, and when it tanked, he was wiped out. Now he's on a very public suicide mission to get some answers and get even, not just for himself, but for everybody else who got ripped off when he did. It'd help here if the bomber, played by Jack O'Connell, didn't look quite so much like a guy who might be a suicide bomber, and the whole thing seems a little far-fetched, but who knows? When so much of our infotainment (there's a horrible word)  is designed to divide and provoke, you can see how a lot of people could be pissed off by something like this. And it's not hard to imagine one of them being crazy enough to do something about it. Foster manages the escalating tension with skill and efficiency, while Clooney brings his self-mocking star power to a character who's not quite as smart as he'd like people to think he is, and much too vain to admit it. Throw this in with "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "The Big Short", and you've got a de facto trilogy: three dramatized takes on a real-world financial system that's become more and more suspect, the suspicion being that the crooks at the top are rigging the game, stacking the deck in their favor, and scamming the rest of us.

Listomania / Take 7

Movies Leonardo DiCaprio has made with Martin Scorsese:

              "Gangs of New York"

              "The Aviator"

              "The Departed"

              "Shutter Island"

              "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Movies John Goodman has made with the Coen Brothers:

              "Raising Arizona"

              "Barton Fink"

              "The Hudsucker Proxy"

              "The Big Lebowski"

              "Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?"

              "Inside Lewyn Davis"

Movies Johnny Depp has made with Tim Burton:

              "Edward Scissorhands"

              "Ed Wood"

              "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

              "Corpse Bride"

              "Sweeney Todd"

              "Alice In Wonderland"

              "Dark Shadows"

              "Alice Through the Looking Glass"

A Damsel In Distress (1937)

A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: George Stevens
    Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, George Burns,
    Gracie Allen, Constance Collier, Reginald Gardiner,
    Ray Noble, Harry Watson, Montagu Love
Fred plays a visiting Yank who falls for a girl from an English noble family who can't decide whether or not she wants to fall for him. A typically light (and light-hearted) Fred Astaire musical with songs by George and Ira Gershwin. There's no Ginger Rogers or Eleanor Powell or Cyd Charisse on hand to enhance the dance routines. Instead, Fred's partners include Joan Fontaine, Burns and Allen, and in a memorable final number, a drum kit. Highlights: Fred, George and Gracie hoofing their way through a carnival fun house, and Fred singing "A Foggy Day In London Town" in the fog, but out in the country, a long way from London.

The Nice Guys (2016)

THE NICE GUYS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Shane Black
    Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice,
    Matt Bomer, Beau Knapp, Margaret Qualley,
    Lois Smith, Keith David, Kim Basinger
Mischief and mayhem with Russell Crowe as a brass-knuckles enforcer (he'll beat people up for a price) and Ryan Gosling as a dim-bulb private eye, who for a price will stay on the trail of people he knows to be dead. The two meet cute, or what qualifies as cute in a movie like this, when Crowe, on assignment, delivers a message from a client by twisting Gosling's arm. Till it breaks. In no time at all, they're partners, trying to solve the case of a dead porno actress and a missing reel of film. It's a throwaway, but the humor is gleefully underhanded and the boys are having a real good time. Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling's 13-year-old daughter, has the look and self-assurance of a young Reese Witherspoon. 

Untamed Youth (1957)

UNTAMED YOUTH  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Howard W. Koch
    Mamie Van Doren, Lori Nelson, John Russell,
    Don Burnett, Lurene Tuttle, Eddie Cochran
Mamie Van Doren and her kid sister are busted for hitchhiking and skinny-dipping while passing through the South on their way to Hollywood. They're sentenced to 30 days on a coed work farm, where they pick cotton all day and boogie to rock & roll in the mess hall at night. Musical interludes include "Cottonpicker" performed a cappella in a cotton field by Eddie Cochran, and Mamie wiggling her way through "Go, Go, Calypso" and "Oobala Baby", her generous physical attributes showcased prominently throughout. As bad movies go, it's fantastic, trash for the ages, and as such, should not be missed. 

The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Felix Van Groenigen
    Veerle Baetens, Johan Heldenbergh, Nell Cattrysse
A musical romance from Belgium, about the relationship between a bluegrass musician named Didier and a tattoo artist named Elise. The roles are effectively cast. Johan Heldenbergh as Didier looks like Kris Kristofferson gone to seed, and Veerle Baetens looks enough like Reese Witherspoon to be her sister, only, you know, with a lot of tattoos. That adds a certain resonance to the scene where Didier proposes to Elise on stage, just like Joaquin Phoenix did to Witherspoon in "Walk the Line". There's a remarkable turn by Nell Cattrysse as the little girl who appears too briefly in the couple's lives, and the movie's best moments are heartbreaking. The film, like its characters, goes deep-end crazy in the second hour, but there's a reason for that. A happy ending might not be in the cards for these two, but at least they've got a great soundtrack backing them up. It's some of the finest Belgian bluegrass you're ever likely to hear. 

Nosferatu (1922)

NOSFERATU  (1922)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: F. W. Murnau
    Max Schreck, Alexander Cranach, 
    Gustav von Wagenheim, Greta Schröder,
    Gustav Botz, Ruth Lanshoff, John Gottowt 
The silent horror classic about an old vampire who moves to a new town and brings the Black Death with him. The story's transparently lifted from Bram Stoker's "Dracula", with the names changed to provide some flimsy legal cover while doing nothing to conceal the obvious theft. Ghastly, ghostly Max Schreck is the creepiest vampire ever, with the possible exception of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's remake from 1979. He doesn't even look human. For an interesting double feature, watch this with "Shadow of the Vampire", a weirdly imagined retelling in which Schreck himself belongs to the undead.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tom Ford
    Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon,
    Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber,
    Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Michael Sheen
A dark-edged thriller starring Amy Adams as an art gallery owner who gets an unexpected package delivered to her office - a proof copy of a novel by her ex-husband, dedicated to her. As she reads the book, the film plays out on three tracks: the story of the woman reading the novel, the story in the novel, and the story, told in flashbacks, of what happened to the woman's marriage years before. Some of this is real hard to watch - after the first couple of reels, an empty highway in West Texas late at night is a place you'll never want to be - and some of Ford's images, like the opening shots of fat, nude women dancing, are just bizarre. It all has the effect of keeping you off balance, wondering, along with Adams, just what the novelist is up to, and never knowing which characters, if any, you can trust. The conclusion, a moment of withering realization played brilliantly by Adams, is as twisted as they come. 

Tender Comrade (1943)

TENDER COMRADE  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edward Dmytryk
    Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey,
    Patricia Collinge, Kim Hunter, Mady Christians
A wartime flag-waver about four women who pool their resources to rent a house while their husbands are in uniform overseas. Its patriotic intentions are hard to dispute, but the emphasis on shared sacrifice and collective decision-making would get Dmytryk and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in hot water later on. Both were blacklisted.

Zootopia (2016)

ZOOTOPIA  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush
Against the wishes of her parents, who just want her to be safe, a cute little rabbit follows her dreams by becoming the first bunny to wear a badge in the Zootopia Police Department. Zootopia's a place where all creatures live in relative harmony, but lately, several animals have gone missing, and somebody seems to be trying to divide the community by turning the predators against the prey. Adults should appreciate this as much as kids do, and the notion of a government trying to control its population through fear and divisiveness resonates even more in the wake of the 2016 election. The rodent "Mr. Big" sounds suspiciously like a character in a famous gangster movie, and anybody who's ever spent an hour or two waiting to renew a driver's license will be able to relate to a DMV bureau run entirely by sloths. Exactly what a carnivore is supposed to eat in a Zootopian society is an issue the movie fails to address. 

So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM (2004)

SO FUNNY IT HURT: BUSTER KEATON & MGM
    D: Christopher Bird, Kevin Brownlow     (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢
A documentary on the unhappy time Buster Keaton spent making movies at MGM between 1928 and 1933. The reasons for the implosion of Keaton's life and career were various, but it's certain that his move from independent production to a factory studio had a significant negative effect. Keaton himself considered it the worst mistake he ever made, and in interview footage from 1964, he speaks candidly about the lost years that followed. The clips compiled here essentially chronicle the collapse, from "The Cameraman", made when he was still pretty much at his peak, through a series of inferior (but still profitable) films over which he had an ever-decreasing amount of creative control. James Karen spends a little too much time on screen, walking around an empty studio lot playing host, but as a record of a great artist's decline and fall, the movie's both sad and fascinating. 

Religulous (2008)

RELIGULOUS  (2008)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Larry Charles 
Bill Maher's caustic documentary on organized religion plays like a stand-up routine expanded to include a wide range of zealots - Muslim, Christian and Jewish - whose inflexible declarations of belief make them a perfect foil for the comic's barbed skepticism. It's mostly a series of cheap shots at easy targets, not that most of the targets aren't asking for it. What's harder to find is any sense that there could be more to religion than blind faith, that not all believers are dogmatic fundamentalists, and that a lot of them probably have doubts and questions not much different from Maher's, but going there would require a level of intellectual engagement that Maher doesn't seem interested in. He'd rather take on the cuckoos and crackpots, and while the result is a relatively funny movie, it's not an especially enlightening one. 

92 In the Shade (1975)

92 IN THE SHADE  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Thomas McGuane
    Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton,
    Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Ashley, Burgess Meredith,
    Sylvia Miles, William Hickey, John Quade
A crackpot character study starring Fonda, Oates and Stanton as rival guide-boat captains in the Florida Keys. There's not much of a story. Fonda's the new kid on the dock and Oates keeps threatening to kill him. That's about it. But it's full of memorable, off-the-wall scenes and images. "Easy Rider" Fonda tooling around town on a one-speed bicycle. Kidder slipping a six-pack into her handbag as she goes off to teach school. Elizabeth Ashley as Stanton's frustrated wife going into a bar to show off her baton-twirling skills. And any scene that features the joint participation of Stanton and Oates. The only movie directed by Thomas McGuane, who adapted it from his own novel. Definitely one of a kind, and worth checking out.

Harry Dean Stanton

(1926-2017)

Rock the Kasbah (2015)

ROCK THE KASBAH  (2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Barry Levinson
    Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson,
    Zooey Deschanel, Leem Lubany, Arian Moayed,
    Scott Caan, Danny McBride, Fahim Fazli 
Murray plays a bottom-feeding agent who books his only bookable client on a USO tour in Afghanistan. They get there and she bolts, leaving him broke and without a passport. But there's a talent-contest reality show on Afghan TV, and an Afghan girl up in the mountains with an incredible voice. Where do you suppose this is going? Uh huh. Murray's unhinged obnoxiousness is a throwback to some of his earlier work, and the movie's kind of all over the place, barging along between crazy and crass. It's got its moments, though, enough to qualify as a guilty pleasure maybe, depending on your mood. Musical highlight: Leem Lubany as the Afghan girl covering Cat Stevens. Musical lowlight: Murray's ear-splitting rendition of "Smoke On the Water".

Gettysburg (1993)

GETTYSBURG  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ronald F. Maxwell
    Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen,
    Sam Elliott, Richard Jordan, Stephen Lang,
    C. Thomas Howell, Kevin Conway, Andrew Prine,
    Richard Anderson, George Lazenby, John Diehl
Ted Turner's storybook recreation of the Civil War battle captures the scope of the clash and some of the strategy, while sidestepping its colossal savagery. (Almost as many Americans died at Gettysburg as in the entire Vietnam War. That's a lot of severed limbs and screaming men and corpses on the battlefield.) The acting's quite good, despite a script that favors speech-making over conversation. (Jeff Daniels, playing Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, could be apologizing for the entire picture when he ends an address to a group of mutinous soldiers by remarking, "I didn't mean to preach.") Daniels, in fact, gives the movie's most believably heroic performance, and Chamberlain's valiant defense of a strategic hill is the film's most exciting sustained sequence. Martin Sheen looks troubled as Robert E. Lee, the brilliant, charismatic Confederate commander whose misguided stubbornness (and incomplete scouting reports) determined the battle's outcome. (The Confederate charge into the center of the Union line on the last day is sheer suicide, but nobody outranks Lee, and nobody can counteract Lee's command.) The battle scenes are more picturesque than bloody - any movie that depicted the war's real carnage would probably be unwatchable - and the second-unit work looks a little sloppy, with some reenactors standing idly by while others catch bayonets and musket balls a few feet away. But on its own romanticized terms, "Gettysburg" is a significant accomplishment, an illuminating epic that brings history to life and holds your attention, speeches and all, for most of its four-and-a-half-hour running time.

Richard Anderson

(1926-2017)

The Hit List: Natalie Portman

    The first movie I saw Natalie Portman in was Luc Besson's "The Professional" in 1994. That's the one where Jean Reno plays a hit man and Portman plays this precocious kid who wants to learn how to kill people. It's a remarkable performance for a child actor, a 12-year-old going on 30, "Lolita" with a grudge and a cold-eyed approach to revenge. What's especially impressive is that unlike most kids on screen, Portman doesn't act cute. She just acts.
    She's made about 50 movies since then - period pieces ("Cold Mountain", "The Other Boleyn Girl"), science fiction (three "Star Wars" films), big-budget movies, low-budget movies, shorts, superhero adventures, heavy-duty dramas like "Black Swan", and a western ("Jane Got a Gun"). And she played "Jackie". For somebody with star status working mostly out of mainstream Hollywood, she's mixed it up quite a bit.
    Here's a diverse selection of titles from her growing body of work:

"Beautiful Girls" (1996/Ted Demme)
Portman and Timothy Hutton meet up over the backyard fence and realize they could be soulmates, except that he's 29 and she's 13.
"Everyone Says I Love You" (1996/Woody Allen)
Natalie's a small part of the ensemble in Woody Allen's fizzy song-and-dance movie.
"Where the Heart Is" (2000/Matt Williams)
The movie equivalent of a paperback romance, with Portman as a white-trash teenager who gives birth in a Wal-Mart store. Yecch.
"Closer" (2004/Mike Nichols)
Four of the world's most beautiful people play musical beds. Portman's a stripper who never strips, so what's the point?
"V For Vendetta" (2005/James McTeigue)
"Remember, remember, the fifth of November."
"Goya's Ghosts" (2006/Milos Forman)
Portman goes through hell as a young woman tortured by the Spanish Inquisition.
"Hotel Chevalier" (2007/Wes Anderson)
A 13-minute prequel to "The Darjeeling Limited", with Natalie and Jason Schwartzman as an estranged couple playing out the last act in a ruined relationship. It's a serious downer, but Natalie gets naked in it, so there's that.
"New York, I Love You" (2008/episode "Mira Nair")
In Nair's segment of this anthology movie, Portman's an Orthodox diamond merchant who shares a revealing moment with a colleague played by Irrfan Khan.
"Thor" (2011/Kenneth Branagh)
Natalie provides the love interest for Chris Hemsworth's hammering man.
"Jane Got a Gun" (2016/Gavin O'Connor)
Shades of "Straw Dogs", with Portman as a woman defending her ranch against a marauding gang of outlaws. 

   Marriage and motherhood do not appear to have slowed Portman down. (Her husband is "Black Swan" choreographer Benjamin Millepied.) She's tried her hand at writing, producing and directing, and she's got an Academy Award. And she's still in her 30s. Movie careers are notoriously hard to predict, especially for women, but Portman looks like somebody who could be around for the duration. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but in the same way you wouldn't want to underestimate that kid she plays in "The Professional", it'd be a mistake to bet against Natalie Portman.