The Sea Wolves (1980)

THE SEA WOLVES  (1980)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrew V. McLaglen
    Gregory Peck, Roger Moore, David Niven,
    Trevor Howard, Barbara Kellerman, Patrick Macnee,
    Percy Herbert, Donald Houston, John Standing
A kind of geriatric "Guns of Navarone", with Peck and Moore as cloak-and-dagger operatives who recruit a gang of Boer War veterans to take out a German ship anchored off the coast of India during World War Two. Improbably, the story it's based on is true, which would make the actual commandos at least as old as the actors playing them. Loaded with anachronisms, from Peck's quasi-British accent to Moore's tux-and-a-smirk James Bond routine. It's fun to watch the old boys at work. Just don't expect "The Guns of Navarone". 

Roger Moore

(1927-2017)

Screen Test / Take 9

Match the following actresses with the movies in which they played strippers:

                           1. Daryl Hannah
                           2. Natalie Portman
                           3. Margot Kidder
                           4. Goldie Hawn
                           5. Barbara Stanwyck
                           6. Elizabeth Berkley
                           7. Salma Hayek
                           8. Molly Parker
                           9. Demi Moore
                         10. Natalie Wood

                           a. "Showgirls"
                           b. "CrissCross"
                           c. "Gypsy"
                          d. "Lady of Burlesque"
                          e. "Dogma"
                           f. "Striptease"
                          g. "Little Treasure"
                          h. "Dancing At the Blue Iguana"
                           i.  "The Center of the World"
                           j.  "Closer"

         Answers:

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

Tombstone (1993)

TOMBSTONE  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: George P. Cosmatos
    Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott,
    Dana Delaney, Joanna Pacula, Powers Boothe,
    Michael Rooker, Charlton Heston, Bill Paxton,
    Stephen Lang, Thomas Haden Church,
    Billy Bob Thornton, Harry Carey Jr.
The Earp brothers and Doc Holliday go up against the bad guys in yet another cinematic retelling of the events leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It's a playfully off-the-wall western, openly stealing from every frontier shoot-'em-up since "The Great Train Robbery". (It even runs the final shot from "The Great Train Robbery" in its introduction.) From there it takes off on whatever offbeat tangents its creators can come up with. (In a classic face-off not to be found in any other movie, Doc and Johnny Ringo trade quips in Latin, before engaging in a test of manual dexterity in which Ringo shows his skill at twirling a six-gun and Doc responds by mimicking the routine with a coffee cup.) A lot of "Tombstone" is like that: predictable only on the surface, and more than a little weird around the edges. 

Powers Boothe

(1948-2017)

The Brand New Testament (2015)

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jaco Van Dormael
    Pili Groyne, Benoît Poelvoorde, Marco Lorenzini,
    Catherine Deneuve, Yolande Moreau, Francois Damiens,
    Laura Verlinden, Serge Larivière, Didier De Neck,
    David Murgia, Anna Tenta, Dominique Abel
Maybe there's something in the beer they brew in Belgium, but whatever it is, some of the most inventive comedies of the early 21st century have come from there. This one imagines that God, who in Genesis created Brussels before He did anything else, is a sadistic bastard who makes life miserable for human beings because He feels like it and because He can. He has a wife who's mute and a rebellious young daughter named Ea, who's just about had it with the Old Man's abusive behavior. So with a little help and encouragement from her brother J.C. (yes, that J.C.), Ea slips into her Dad's computer room and before shutting the system down, sends out text messages informing every person on earth of the exact time of their death. Then she escapes through a washing machine into a real world she's never experienced before and starts looking around for a few new disciples. If you think this doesn't get even crazier, try to think of another movie in which Catherine Deneuve ends up in bed with a gorilla. There's something to think about and plenty to laugh about, along with a heroine who's a lot like "Amelie", except that she can multiply ham sandwiches and walk on water. And if the Big Guy Himself were to end up on an assembly line in Uzbekistan, manufacturing washing machines and trying without any luck to get back home, well, maybe that's exactly what He deserves. 

Night Flight (1933)

NIGHT FLIGHT  (1933)  ¢ ¢
    D: Clarence Brown
    John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Lionel Barrymore,
    Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Robert Montgomery
Daring aviators fly single-prop biplanes over the Andes at night through the lightning and fog. Gable and Montgomery play two of the pilots. Ground control is in the hands of the Barrymore brothers. Hayes and Loy play wives on the ground, waiting for their men to come home. An all-star cast, but a two-star script. At least the mail gets through.

Grindhouse (2007)

GRINDHOUSE  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez
    Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, Jeff Fahey,
    Michael Parks, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt,
    Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell,
    Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Freddy Rodriguez
With bullets flying and muscle cars ripping over country roads, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez lovingly recreate the experience of watching the kinds of grade-Z exploitation movies they grew up watching themselves. It's set up as a double feature, complete with trailers, scratched film stock and titles apologizing for missing reels. The Rodriguez feature comes first. It's called "Planet Terror", and it's a zombie movie whose high point comes when an amputee stripper played by Rose McGowan replaces her table-leg prosthesis with a machine gun. The co-hit (as they used to be billed at the drive-in) is Tarantino's "Death Proof", with Kurt Russell doing a dead-on self-parody as a tough-as-nails stuntman locked in a fender-smashing, gravel-spewing demolition race with a carload of women, one of them real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell. There might be a built-in limitation to what you can do with this material, but for anybody who ever spent a long summer evening watching movies through the windshield of a car at the Badger or the Big Sky or the Starlite 14, "Grindhouse" is a lot of fun. The made-up trailers include one for a hyperviolent thriller called "Machete", which became a real movie (and then a sequel) directed by Rodriguez and starring Danny Trejo. "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" were eventually released separately on video.

Michael Parks

(1940-2017)

The Extra Girl (1923)

THE EXTRA GIRL  (1923)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: F. Richard Jones
    Mabel Normand, Ralph Graves, George Nichols,
    Anna Hernandez, Vernon Dent, Ramsey Wallace
A relatively late Mabel Normand vehicle, with Mabel as a girl who runs off to Hollywood hoping to become a star and lands a job as an assistant in the wardrobe department. There's almost as much melodrama as comedy in this, but it's an interesting behind-the-scenes peek at the dream factory, and the part with the lion should get your attention if nothing else does. I don't know what they did to direct and film the lion, but that looks like one seriously pissed-off cat. 

The Wait (2015)

THE WAIT  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Piero Messina
    Juliette Binoche, Lou de Laâge, Giorgio Colangeli,
    Domenico Diele, Antonio Folletto, Corinna Locasto
This movie begins with a funeral. It's in an old church, and the church looks immense. As mourners shuffle past the coffin, a middle-aged woman stands off to the side, almost in the shadows, not quite watching, not quite there. She wears her face like a mask, but something about her, a faint tremor about her eyes and mouth, tells you she's barely holding it together.   It's not just grief. She's damaged, broken, lost. The woman's name is Anna, and she's played by Juliette Binoche. She lives alone (with a surly caretaker) on an estate in Sicily, and it soon becomes clear (without being stated) that the deceased is her son, Giuseppe. The funeral's barely over when a young woman named Jeanne shows up, Giuseppe's estranged girlfriend, not knowing what's happened and still hoping to patch things up. Anna's too paralyzed to tell her, and that's how they spend most of the movie: one waiting for Giuseppe to appear, the other pretending to. It's hard to imagine anybody in Hollywood making a movie this slow. In fact, it's hard to imagine anybody in Hollywood making a movie like this, period. I'm not sure how well it holds up. Anna definitely looks like she's hiding something, and you start to wonder why Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) doesn't catch on, or at least become more suspicious. Of course, she's in love and a little bit desperate herself. Maybe she doesn't want to know, or doesn't want to admit it. Both characters are on the edge emotionally, and both reach a level of acceptance at the end, or seem to, their conversation not quite finished and the truth never really being told.

The Heavenly Body (1943)

THE HEAVENLY BODY  (1943)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alexander Hall
    Hedy Lamarr, William Powell, James Craig,
    Fay Bainter, Henry O'Neill, Spring Byington
There are two heavenly bodies in this. One's a comet, newly discovered in the night sky by astronomer William Powell. The other's the astronomer's wife, played by Hedy (not Hedley) Lamarr. He's spending way too much time at the observatory, so she consults an astrologer and learns she's about to meet another man, which soon happens. So she falls for the new guy and he falls for her and the astronomer gets jealous, and you can see where it's all going to go, and it does. It's not especially funny, or especially interesting, which is too bad, because that's a great title for a movie starring Hedy Lamar. The script goes flat before it goes anywhere, and there's not much the stars - celestial or otherwise - can do about that. References to blackouts and rationing, as well as a bunch of dancing, vodka-swilling Russians, are enough to let you know what time frame you're in.