The Hateful Eight (2015)

THE HATEFUL EIGHT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Quentin Tarantino
    Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh,
    Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Demián Bichir,
    Walton Goggins, Channing Tatum, Lee Horsly, Zoe Bell
Eight despicable characters find shelter from a Wyoming blizzard at a remote stagecoach stop called Minnie's Haberdashery. So they've escaped the storm - as long as they can keep the door nailed shut - but not each other, and since they're in a Tarantino movie, it's only a matter of time before the guns come out and the blood starts to fly. In fact, it takes a long time for the bloody stuff to happen, long enough for you to wonder whether they're ever going to start shooting, or maybe just talk each other to death. Tarantino's both a joker and a sadist. It's not incidental. It's part of his DNA. Whether there's a significant point to it all remains unclear, but there's no doubt about his cinematic knowledge and skill. He makes his characters suffer - a lot - but he writes great dialogue and he always gives his actors a chance to shine. You can see why people like working with him. Jackson, Russell, Madsen and Roth are all Quentin regulars, but the scene-stealer among the eight is Jennifer Jason Leigh as a woman with a black eye, several knocked-out teeth, a nasty disposition and a $10,000 bounty on her head. Not since Sissy Spacek closed down the prom in "Carrie" has an actress earned an Oscar nomination playing a character covered in this much blood. 

Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956)

ROCK, ROCK, ROCK!  (1956)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Will Price
    Tuesday Weld, Teddy Rendazzo, Fran Manfred,
    Jacqueline Kerr, Jack Collins, Carol Moss
This looks like an anthology of very early rock-&-roll videos tacked onto a teen musical about a high-school girl trying to scrape up the cash for a dress to wear to the prom. The movie's slight, but the music's a blast. Alan Freed introduces most of the tunes. The Flamingoes, the Moonglows and LaVern Baker are among the featured stars. Chuck Berry does his famous duck walk while performing "You Can't Catch Me", but you can't help noticing his guitar's not plugged in. Many of the musicians are black, their segments conspicuously segregated from the rest of the film. 13-year-old Tuesday Weld plays the lead and looks like she's reading her lines from a cue card. She's seriously cute, though. You can see how she could break a few adolescent hearts. Tuesday's songs were dubbed by Connie Francis.

Chuck Berry

(1926-2017)

Get Out (2017)

GET OUT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jordan Peele
    Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener,
    Bradley Whitford, Marcus Henderson, Caleb Landry Jones
Unsettling, race-based horror about a young black photographer on a weekend trip to the country to meet his white girlfriend's parents. That she's neglected to tell them he's black (or so she says) turns out to be the least of his worries. A thriller that processes perceived stereotypes and deep-rooted fears into gradually escalating terror. If you're white, the movie opens a window on what it feels like to be black in an all-white universe. If you're black, you know that already. And if horror movies are where our nightmares go to hang out and party, this one's the all-night rave from hell. Wanna dance?

A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: George Cukor
    John Barrymore, Katharine Hepburn, Billie Burke,
    David Manners, Henry Stephenson, Paul Cavanagh
Katharine Hepburn's first movie, a melodrama starring John Barrymore as a veteran of the Great War who escapes from the asylum where he's spent years being treated for shell shock and a hereditary mental condition. Claiming to be cured, he makes his way home to his wife and daughter, whose lives have moved on, while his hasn't. It's all a bit dated, but there's a chemistry between Barrymore and Hepburn that's hard to miss. As a father and daughter, they're perfectly matched. Barrymore doesn't overdo it for once (and he could have). He gives what for him is a restrained performance. Hepburn, meanwhile, makes her presence known the moment she strides onto the screen, staking her claim from the start as a force to be reckoned with. There's no doubt about it. She was always Katharine Hepburn.

Thor (2011)

THOR  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kenneth Branagh
    Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston,
    Stellan Skarsgård, Anthony Hopkins, Kat Dennings
A hunky hero with a heavy hammer crashes to earth and meets Natalie Portman. Also, there are special effects.

Folies Bergère de Paris (1935)

FOLIES BERGÈRE DE PARIS  (1935)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roy Del Ruth
    Maurice Chevalier, Merle Oberon, Ann Sothern,
    Eric Blore, Walter Byron, Lumsden Hare
Maurice Chevalier, who was a headliner at the Folies Bergère, plays a headliner at the Folies Bergère, hired for a night to impersonate a wealthy count, also played by Maurice Chevalier. This leads to multiple cases of mistaken identity involving the count, his double, the count's wife (Merle Oberon) and the double's flame at the Folies (Ann Sothern). Chevalier was nearing the end of his first stint in Hollywood then. He'd work mostly in Europe for the next 20 years. When he returned in the late 1950s, in movies like "Gigi" and "Love In the Afternoon", he was older, but still jaunty, still grinning, and still thanking heaven for little girls.

Café Society (2016)

CAFÉ SOCIETY  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, 
    Blake Lively, Corey Stoll, Parker Posey,
    Jeannie Berlin, Ken Stott, Sheryl Lee
This is a Woody Allen movie that doesn't seem to be about very much till the very end, when you realize that maybe it is. You've seen the characters in Woody movies before. The bright, caustic, Jewish dweeb (Jesse Eisenberg), a New Yorker looking for some sort of work in Hollywood. The smart young woman (Kristen Stewart) who wears little-girl outfits and falls for a slimy older man (Steve Carell), just like Emma Stone and Colin Firth in "Magic In the Moonlight". The wealthy sophisticates. The working-class family back in New York. The brass-knuckles gangster (Corey Stoll) who can make people disappear for good. It's set in the 1930s (Woody's favorite time frame) and Vittorio Storaro bathes Santo Loquasto's beautiful sets in a nostalgic golden glow. Every character is handy with a quip, and the approach to fidelity is casual. It's like that right up to its wistful conclusion, when it occurs to you that the old man doing the voiceover narration (Woody) has something to say, after all: the notion that we all have to live with our decisions, no matter how impulsive or misguided. And something more: that it's not just the choices we make, it's the timing of them that makes all the difference in the world. 

Black Narcissus (1947)

BLACK NARCISSUS  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
    Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Sabu, Jean Simmons,
    Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Jenny Laird,
    Judith Furse, Nancy Roberts, Esmond Knight
A small community of nuns open a school and clinic high in the Himalayas, in a remote cliffside palace that used to house a harem. The nuns see the atmosphere with its spectacularly clean air as corrupting, but is it corrupting them, or just tapping into the corruption they've brought with them? Deborah Kerr plays the young mother superior. David Farrar plays the handsome ex-pat whose devilish manner and bare legs and torso could cause a cloistered girl to rethink her vow of celibacy. Needless to say, the film ran into trouble with the Catholic Church. Jack Cardiff did the Technicolor cinematography, and amazingly, the whole thing was shot on a soundstage.

A Bigger Splash (2015)

A BIGGER SPLASH  (2015)  ¢ ¢
    D: Luca Guadagnino
    Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes,
    Dakota Johnson, Aurore Clément, Lily McMenamy
This is about some beautiful, boring, rich people hanging out on the Mediterranean together. Sicily, I think. Tilda Swinton plays a pop star left voiceless by recent throat surgery. Matthias Schoenaerts plays her current partner, a filmmaker trying to stay sober in the wake of a suicide attempt. Ralph Fiennes plays Swinton's ex, an obnoxious record producer who has worked with the Rolling Stones and never wastes a chance to let everybody know about that. Dakota Johnson plays Fiennes' petulant daughter, whose mission in life seems to be to make everybody around her as miserable as possible. Something happens to one of them eventually, and it's enough to throw a monkey wrench into their bickering time in paradise, but not enough to make any of them less boring. They sure are beautiful people, though, and the approach to nudity is distinctly European. From a purely visual standpoint, watching this movie is no hardship at all. 

The Trip (1967)

THE TRIP  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Roger Corman
    Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper,
    Susan Strasberg, Luana Anders, Dick Miller
Peter Fonda drops acid. Dennis Hopper's the dealer. Bruce Dern's the tour guide. Jack Nicholson wrote the script. Roger Corman directed, after tripping himself. Apparently he enjoyed the research. Far out.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

STAR TREK BEYOND  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Justin Lin
    Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban,
    Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin,
    John Cho, Idris Elba, Sofia Boutella
The Starship Enterprise blasts off into an unstable nebula, because, like, why would you want to blast off into a stable one? There they encounter much danger, the ship is destroyed, the crew is scattered, and the fate of the Federation once again hangs in the balance. After an impressive reboot (thanks to J.J. Abrams) and a satisfying transition (thanks to Leonard Nimoy), the franchise has settled into a comfortable B-movie groove, or a B-movie groove with an A-movie budget: a formula story with plenty of action and characters we've spent 50 years getting to know and appreciate. The romance is incidental this time around, except for the discreet liaison between Spock and Uhura, and they spend most of the movie apart and not speaking to each other. (A passing shot of Sulu and his apparently happy family suggests an enlightened attitude in Starfleet toward same-sex relationships. The movie doesn't make a big deal out of this. It's just there.) There's a new character (and potential crew member), an alien warrior named Jayla, who has a joking, combative chemistry with Mr. Scott that you wouldn't mind seeing developed in future episodes, and that could happen, if Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, continues to work on the scripts. The chronically hot-blooded Kirk barely gets to leer at anybody this time, but he's too busy swashbuckling and zipping around on a motorcycle to do much leering, anyway. It's the last Starfleet mission for Chekhov (the late Anton Yelchin), and Nimoy appears fleetingly as an image on the younger Spock's hand-held video device. One of them, at least, got to live long and prosper.

Desert Island Partners / Take 3

More actor/director combinations that clicked:

                    Lon Chaney and Tod Browning

                    Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack

                    Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher

                    Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese

                    Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder

                    Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino

                    Keith Carradine and Alan Rudolph

                    Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog

                    Divine and John Waters

                    Douglas Fairbanks and Allan Dwan

Twister (1996)

TWISTER  (1996)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jan De Bont
    Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes,
    Jami Gertz, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck,
    Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Davies,
    Todd Field, Zach Grenier, Jake Busey
Rival gangs of meteorologists chase tornadoes across rural Oklahoma in the kind of movie where you can tell who the evil scientists are because they drive sleek, black minivans, and the ragtag heroes always emerge unscathed, and even manage to keep their eyes open in the face of 300-m.p.h. winds. Pictures like this exist for their special effects, not their stark realism, and the effects in "Twister" are awesome. It's not art and it's not trying to be, but the people who made it knew what they wanted to get and got it, and the goofy camaraderie between the players suggests they were either on the same page or in on the same joke. Whatever else it may or may not be, it's an exciting carnival ride. 

Bill Paxton

(1955-2017)