13 MINUTES (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Christian Friedel, Katharina Schüttler,
Burghart Klaussner, Johann von Bülow,
David Zimmershied, Felix Eitner
Dr. Sporgersi,
I saw a good German movie last week. "13 Minutes", a true story about a guy named Georg Elser, who back in 1939 planted a homemade bomb in a building where Hitler was scheduled to give a speech. The bomb blew up the building, but missed killing Hitler by 13 minutes. A lot of the story is told in flashbacks while the bomber's being tortured and interrogated. To say that some of it's unpleasant and disturbing would be an understatement, but when everything goes to the dark side, this is what you get. It's a movie that could complicate your thinking about terrorism. To watch it in the wake of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville was sobering.
Nick
THE FRENCH LINE (1954) ¢ ¢
D: Lloyd Bacon
Jane Russell, Gilbert Roland, Arthur Hunnictt,
Mary McCarty, Craig Stevens, Steven Geray
A curvy Texas millionaire (Jane Russell) catches the boat to Paris, posing as a fashion model and catching the eye of a smooth-talking Lothario played by Gilbert Roland. An undistinguished musical produced by Howard Hughes and designed to cash in on Russell's most visible assets and her success in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" the previous year. The movie at the time was way too suggestive for the puritans at the Legion of Decency. They condemned it. See if you can figure out why.
HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (2002) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Chris Columbus
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint,
Kenneth Branagh, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris,
Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths,
Julie Walters, Gemma Jones, John Cleese,
Sean Biggerstaff, Fiona Shaw, Shirley Henderson
The second episode in the franchise begins with Harry being visited at home by a house elf named Dobby, who warns him not to go back to Hogwarts. Of course, he does go back, in a flying car, and the adventure begins, with the young wizards out to foil a plot that could close their school forever. For somebody who's never read any of J.K. Rowling's books, this entry holds up pretty well. You can start to kind of see how a generation of kids got hooked on a series of relatively long novels about young people casting spells and fighting evil and flying around on broomsticks. Kenneth Branagh has a good time playing an ego-addled professor, and Richard Harris makes his final appearance as Dumbledore.
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Robert Aldrich
James Stewart, Hardy Krüger, Richard Attenborough,
Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Bannen,
Dan Duryea, George Kennedy, Ronald Fraser,
Christian Marquand, Gabriele Tinti, Barrie Chase
When a plane without a functioning radio crashes in the Libyan desert, a hundred miles from the nearest waterhole, it looks like slow death for the survivors. Fortunately, there's an aircraft engineer on board who thinks they can build a new plane from the wreckage of the old one and fly it out of there. Unfortunately, he's an arrogant bastard and everybody hates his guts, they're low on water and food, and who would believe they could actually do such a crazy thing, anyway? A gripping, old-fashioned adventure movie that comes down to a battle of wills between Jimmy Stewart as the old-school pilot and Hardy Krüger as the know-it-all engineer. Barrie Chase appears fleetingly as a belly-dancing hallucination, the only woman in the film. Stunt pilot Paul Mantz was killed testing an experimental aircraft during the shoot.
MAX ROSE (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Daniel Noah
Jerry Lewis, Kerry Bishé, Kevin Pollack,
Claire Bloom, Dean Stockwell, Illeana Douglas,
Fred Willard, Lee Weaver, Mort Sahl
To begin with, this movie has a great performance by Jerry Lewis. Which I can now add to the list of things I've said that I never thought I'd say. Yes. Jerry Lewis. Lewis's character, Max Rose, is 87 years old, about the age Lewis was when he made the picture. (He was 90 by the time it got a U.S. release.) Max, like Lewis, is beyond being able to hide the cumulative effect of all those years. You can see it in the stooped posture, the shuffling gait, the blank stare, the way his mouth hangs open and his eyelids droop. Some of that's acting, of course. And some of it's not. The movie catches Max in a rough transition: the death of his wife Eva (Claire Bloom) and his move from their home to an assisted living facility. And there's a secret, not unlike the one Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling had to deal with in "45 Years", something Max discovers while going through Eva's things. Sentiment kicks in eventually, and issues are resolved a little too neatly, but Lewis, long the world's most manic actor, never overplays his hand. (There's just one brief scene, where Max is clowning with his grandchildren, when the old Jerry surfaces, but it's only for a moment, and it fits in the context of the story.) What happens at the very end is a little obvious - the movie's been leading up to it the whole way - but it's a moment of transcendence for both Max and Jerry Lewis. A more perfect note for the old guy to go out on would be difficult to imagine.
Jerry Lewis
(1926-2017)
MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Richard Benjamin
Peter O'Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper,
Joseph Bologna, Bill Macy, Lainie Kazan,
Lou Jacobi, Cameron Mitchell, Selma Diamond
The year is 1954, and a flamboyant, swashbuckling matinee idol named Alan Swann (Peter O'Toole) has signed up for a guest spot on a TV variety program hosted by King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). A young comedy writer (Mark Linn-Baker) gets stuck with the challenging task of keeping the movie star sober through a week of rehearsals to the actual performance before an audience of several million people. A funny, affectionate, behind-the-scenes look at early live television, with a great comic performance by O'Toole, who captures not only Swann's roaring zest for life, but the melancholy beneath the surface. The real-life model for Alan Swann was Errol Flynn, King Kaiser was Sid Caesar, and the comedy writer, still in his 20s back then, was Mel Brooks.
Joseph Bologna
(1934-2017)
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Tom Tykwer
Tom Hanks, Sarita Choudhury, Alexander Black,
Sidse Babett Knudsen, Tom Skerritt, Ben Whishaw,
Tracey Fairaway, Jane Perry, David Menkin
Jack Lemmon's not around anymore, so it appears to be up to Tom Hanks to play the kinds of roles Lemmon used to specialize in: the middle-aged, middle-class Middle American, the guy who puts on a suit to go to work every day, a beleaguered everyman still chasing some ever-more-elusive remnant of the American Dream. Hanks is good at this, a forced, can-do grin doing nothing to mask the anxiety and encroaching sense of failure in his heart. In this movie, he plays a businessman named Alan, really a high-end sales rep, who jets off to Saudi Arabia to pitch his company's hot new IT system to the king. Once there, he's put on hold, and waits, and waits, and waits. While he's waiting, he strikes up a friendship with a driver (Alexander Black), and something more than a friendship with a female doctor (Sarita Choudhury), and what starts out as a fish-out-of-water comedy evolves into an unlikely but nicely played mid-life romance. Whether a Saudi woman could get away with something like this in her own country, I'm not sure, but you can always hope. Which is what our heroic sales guy finally finds there: a shot at redemption and a measure of self-respect that Willy Loman wouldn't dare to imagine. Hanks even gets to do a little David Byrne riff to start off the movie. Jack Lemmon never had it so good.
PAREE, PAREE (1934) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Roy Mack
Bob Hope, Dorothy Stone, Billie Leonard,
Rodney McLennon, Charles Collins
A very young Bob Hope spots a girl in a nightclub and bets some friends that he can get her to marry him in a month. There's not a lot of suspense in how that'll turn out, but the songs are by Cole Porter and Hope's screen persona already appears fully formed. He'd play the same impulsively lecherous wiseguy for about the next 60 years.
THE INNOCENTS (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Anne Fontaine
Lou de Laâge, Agata Buzek, Agata Kulesza,
Vincent Macaigne, Joanna Kulig, Anna Próchniak
The horror doesn't always end when the war does. Sometimes it's only beginning. "The Innocents" takes place in Poland late in 1945, and it's about a French Red Cross doctor who reluctantly goes to investigate a medical emergency at an isolated convent. What she finds there is the fallout from an atrocity. Russian occupation troops have invaded the cloister repeatedly, raping the women and leaving several of them pregnant. For the nuns, the violation isn't just physical and psychological, it's spiritual. They feel they've been damned. Now it's up to the doctor, and even more to the nuns, to try to navigate the nightmare. It all happens in the winter. There's limited light and snow on the ground. The Russians are still around, and only some quick thinking by the doctor prevents what happened before from happening again to all of them. (At another point, the doctor barely escapes being raped herself.) I know this all sounds pretty downbeat, and I guess it is, but there's a glimmer of hope in it, too, and a resolution that's not only life-affirming, but makes perfect sense. Sometimes, for those who survive it, there's light at the end of the horror.
THE GREAT RACE (1965) ¢ 1/2
D: Blake Edwards
Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood,
Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn, Arthur O'Connell,
Ross Martin, Larry Storch, Dorothy Provine,
Marvin Kaplan, Denver Pyle, Vivian Vance
A big, long, unfunny slapstick comedy, really a live-action cartoon, about an around-the-world auto race. Blake Edwards at his most extravagant and pointless. The pie fight's good, though. It comes at about the 140-minute mark. You could just skip to the pie fight.
"When I leave New York for any other place in the
United States, my nose starts to bleed."
Sidney Lumet
in "By Sidney Lumet"
"And what brings you gentlemen to Casablanca?"
Rebecca Ferguson
in "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation"
"I like London fine where it is. I don't want to
bloody go there."
Michael Caine
in "The Quiet American"
"That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live
anywhere else in the world will always be a
mystery to me."
Marion Cotillard
in "Midnight In Paris"
"All things being equal, I'd rather be in
Philadelphia."
Bruce Willis
in "Die Hard"
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jeff Nichols
Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst,
Jaeden Lieberher, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard
There's a dimly lit room with a television tuned to a newscast, a story about an eight-year-old boy who's apparently been abducted. Three people are moving around in the room: two rough-looking men and a boy wearing goggles - the boy in the newscast. The three people leave and get into a car. It's night. The boy with the goggles sits quietly in the back seat, using a flashlight to read a Superman comic book. You can tell there's something unusual about this kid, and the deference the two men show toward him (and his apparent comfort with them) suggests that this is no ordinary abduction. The story that unfolds involves a cult, a cryptic sequence of numbers, and soon the FBI and the National Security Agency. Where is this going, and how weird will it get? You have no idea. It's like what you might get if David Cronenberg were to direct "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The interiors are shot in limited light. (There's a reason for that.) The actors, including Kirsten Dunst, who plays the boy's mother, are devoid of movie-star glamor. The dialogue is spare, and nothing in the movie seems wasted. As the story plays out and grows increasingly outlandish, you think, how can they make a movie this strange and crazy, that gets stranger and crazier as it goes, and keep it all together and pull it off? I'm not sure I have an answer for that. But they pulled it off.
Sam Shepard
(1943-2017)
THE TRAIN (1964) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: John Frankenheimer
Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau,
Suzanne Flon, Wolfgang Preiss, Michel Simon,
Albert Remy, Jacques Marin, Paul Bonifias
As the Allies close in on Paris late in World War Two, a German army officer loads a train with some of the world's most valuable paintings, hoping to ship them out of France before the liberation. Only sabotage and a dwindling but determined band of railroad resistance fighters stand in the way. An exciting, suspenseful action thriller with an ironic underlying theme: The people taking the risks and dying to save the paintings know nothing about art, while the man trying to steal them is a connoisseur. Arguably the best of the Lancaster/Frankenheimer collaborations, brilliantly shot and crisply edited, ending with a grim visual statement on the idiocy of war and the relative value of art and human life.
Jeanne Moreau
(1928-2017)
