Hell or High Water (2016)

HELL OR HIGH WATER  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Mackenzie
    Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster,
    Gil Birmingham, Dale Dickey, Buck Taylor
This could be a story out of the Great Depression, or the Wild West. It's definitely set in the West, specifically West Texas, which looks like the land that time forgot, and the economy doesn't remember too well, either. It's a place where the prevailing industry appears to be debt, where if you don't own a bank or a couple of oil wells, you're what we used to call shit outta luck. Which means a lot of folks are outta luck. It's about two sets of partners on opposite sides of the law. Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) are bank robbers. Marcus Hamilton and Alberto Parker (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) are state troopers out to catch them. But the real criminals are the banks, not the robbers, or the robbers wouldn't be robbing the banks in the first place. Mackenzie's approach is evenhanded. You end up sympathizing with all of them, even the psychotic, trigger-happy Tanner, who really should be in prison, for everybody's safety including his own. There's a running gag - at least it's sort of a gag - about gun-crazy Texans in the age of concealed-carry, and Bridges has a way of drawling out his vowels and munching on his consonants that lets you know he once played Rooster Cogburn. The movie ends in a standoff, which is not how most movies, especially westerns, typically end. But "Hell or High Water" is not most movies, or a typical one, and a better ending for this story would be hard to imagine. 

All Girl Revue (1940)

ALL GIRL REVUE  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lloyd French
    June Allyson, The Harrison Sisters, Beverly Crane,
    Betty Mae Crane, Beverly Kirk, Edith Brandell
Women take over the city under the leadership of mayor-for-a-day June Allyson. An all-singing, all-dancing, all-girl musical short from Warner Brothers. There's not much to it, but what the heck, if she was running for mayor of my town, I'd vote for June Allyson.

Passengers (2016)

PASSENGERS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Morten Tyldum
    Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen,
    Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Vince Foster
Escapist sci-fi about a man and a woman stranded in space. It seems they're passengers tucked safely away in their suspended-animation pods on a transport taking them and 5,000 other space travelers to a planet 120 years away from Earth, when they wake up 90 years too soon. Now what do they do? Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence play the couple. Laurence Fishburne joins them eventually. Michael Sheen plays their indispensable android bartender. That's it for the ship's company, at least those who aren't fast asleep. A cast like that can hold your attention, but "The Martian", "Gravity" and "Interstellar" all made you care more about their characters and gave you more to think about. The spatial relationship between the exterior of the spaceship, which looks like an elaborate gyroscope, and the interior, which looks roughly the size of Mars, doesn't make any sense, but the movie does raise an interesting question. Suppose you found yourself alone on a space ship and you could choose between spending the next 50 years with Jennifer Lawrence or any of 5,000 other space travelers. What do you think you'd do? Yeah, me, too.

The Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

THE WILD WOMEN OF WONGO  (1958)  ¢ 1/2
    D: James L. Wolcott
    Jean Hawkshaw, Mary Ann Webb, Candé Gerrard,
    Adrienne Bourbeau, Marie Goodhart, Michelle Lamaack 
On the prehistoric island of Wongo, the women are babes but the men are ugly brutes. On the nearby island of Goona, the men are hunks while the women conspicuously lack the cosmetically enhanced attributes of their Wongo counterparts. Dr. Sporgersi and I watched this because we wanted to find out just how bad a movie called "The Wild Women of Wongo" could be. We found out. The part where the Wongo priestess dances with a dead crocodile on her head is a highlight. The actress listed in the credits as Adrienne Bourbeau is not the Adrienne Barbeau who starred in "Escape From New York" and "The Fog". 

Sully (2016)

SULLY  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney,
    Jamey Sheridan, Valerie Mahaffey, Anna Gunn
On January 15, 2009, an American Airlines jet with 155 people on board took off from La Guardia Airport in New York. Almost immediately, the plane struck a flock of birds, knocking out both engines. With La Guardia and airports in New Jersey out of reach due to the plane's low altitude. the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger decided his best (and really only) option was to take advantage of the long, smooth, flat, but watery surface of the Hudson River. In what came to be known as the "Miracle On the Hudson," he nailed the landing and all 155 passengers survived. The total elapsed time between the bird strike and the landing on the Hudson: 3 minutes and 38 seconds. That's fast work. Clint Eastwood's movie about the event tells the story of the flight and its aftermath, as Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), face a National Transportation Safety Board hearing in which they're more or less put on trial for what they did. Tom Hanks plays Sully, and it's not hard to see a parallel between this and the last reel of "Captain Phillips", with a Hanks hero again surviving a perilous ordeal and then going through some sort of PTSD. Whether the NTSB panel was as antagonistic as it's portrayed here, I couldn't say. The hostility doesn't make much sense, but it serves a purpose dramatically, allowing Eastwood to stack the deck against uncaring bureaucrats and in favor of his beleaguered protagonist. He cranks up the tension about an incident whose outcome we already know by keeping the focus on the people involved. The writing is functional. The landing and rescue are hair-raising. The effects are relatively modest. The human element never gets lost. 

Private Property (1960)

PRIVATE PROPERTY  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Leslie Stevens
    Kate Manx, Corey Allen, Warren Oates,
    Robert Ward, Jerome Cowan, Jules Maitland
A provocative, low-budget thriller about a couple of psychos who invade a house in the hills and terrorize the woman who lives there. Warren Oates plays one of the psychos, but the key performance is by Kate Manx as the victim, who's all Doris Day perkiness till she ends up in what would probably be Doris Day's worst nightmare. A chilling bit of stylized subversion, and a definite prototype for Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" movies. Manx committed suicide four years later at 34. 

Movie Star Moment: Nick Nolte

Nick Nolte as Doc
in "Cannery Row" (1982)

   There's a scene in "Cannery Row" where Nick Nolte drinks a beer milkshake. It happens like this:
    Nolte plays a marine biologist named Doc, who's living on a famously rundown stretch of the Monterey waterfront and grudgingly, awkwardly falling for a hooker named Suzy, played by Debra Winger. Doc's drinking a beer out in front of his storefront lab one night, when he looks up and sees Suzy with a customer through a window of the local cathouse. It's more than he can take at that point, so he gets in his car and drives off. He ends up at a roadside diner, where he takes a seat at the counter, and when the waitress asks him what he wants, he remembers Suzy telling him about a guy who once drank a beer milkshake. Doc couldn't feel much lower anyway right then, so he orders one. The waitress (Judy Kerr) eyes him with a mixture of suspicion and seen-it-all resignation and proceeds to fill the order. She sets it down on the counter and Doc studies it for a moment and then slowly brings it to his lips. When he puts it down again, there's foam on his mustache and a look on his face that tells you a lot about what it's like to drink a beer milkshake. Nolte's been known to go to extremes in the interest of realism in his performances, so it's not too outlandish to think that what he's drinking there is the real thing. From his reacti0n, it sure looks like it could be. He looks like he could hurl at any moment, which he doesn't, but one thing at least seems obvious: The cure for romantic agony, or anything else for that matter, is probably not a beer milkshake. 

Jurassic World (2015)

JURASSIC WORLD  (2015)  ¢ ¢
    D: Colin Trevorrow
    Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Irrfan Khan,
    Vincent O'Onofrio, Omar Sy, Judy Greer
Big-ass dinosaurs terrorize and chew up idiot tourists at a theme park in Costa Rica. Because if you can genetically modify the monsters to make them even even bigger and scarier and more dangerous, that's a good thing, right? Well, no, not when you're working from such a tired, recycled script. Vincent D'Onofrio channels Brian Dennehy as the heavy (and he is heavy). Chris Pratt channels Patrick Swayze (or tries to) as the park's resident raptor wrangler. Bryce Dallas Howard plays the executive in charge of P.R. and profits, a ruthless control freak whose inflexibility starts to slip away, along with some of her clothing, as the situation she's helped create goes out of control. And the franchise grinds on, looking more and more like something made for TV. When an animatronic dinosaur is nine times more expressive than any human on the screen, okay, maybe it's not too surprising in something like this, but it's probably not a good sign, either.

The Major and the Minor (1942)

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson,
    Robert Benchley, Diana Lynn, Edward Fielding
Ginger Rogers poses as a 12-year-old to ride the train back to Iowa, when she learns she can't afford the adult fare. On board, she meets Major Ray Milland, who's taken with her schoolgirl charms. When she ends up spending a few days at the military academy he's assigned to, she has to keep the charade going longer than she planned. A sharp, funny comedy, the first American movie directed by Billy Wilder. In a way, it's a precursor to "Some Like It Hot", where instead of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon masquerading as women, you've got Ginger masquerading as this precocious kid. Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the script, and if it seems a little risqué for something released in 1942, that's Billy Wilder.