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. 

Eye In the Sky (2015)

EYE IN THE SKY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gavin Hood
    Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul,
    Barkhad Abdi, Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Northam
A white-knuckle thriller revolving around the thorny implications - legal, moral, political and logistical - of a drone strike on a terrorist target in East Africa. A movie that gets at some complex issues - for which there are no easy answers - while keeping you glued to your seat, a dramatized window on the world of 21st-century warfare. In the whole long history of the movies, the selling of bread has never been more suspenseful. 

The Best Man (1964)

THE BEST MAN  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Franklin Schaffner
    Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Lee Tracy,
    Kevin McCarthy, Edie Adams, Margaret Leighton,
    Shelley Berman, Ann Sothern, Gene Raymond,
    Richard Arlen, John Henry Faulk, Howard K. Smith
Gore Vidal's cold-blooded take on the dirty business of presidential politics, with Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson as rival candidates competing for the endorsement of a dying ex-president played by Lee Tracy. Back then, you might've wondered how somebody as nakedly cynical as Robertson could even hope to get the nomination. These days we know better. That's how you win.

Shelley Berman

(1925-2017)

The Mummy (2017)

THE MUMMY  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Alex Kurtzman
    Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis,
    Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance
Boris Karloff can rest easy, I guess. For all the remakes, sequels, reboots and reworkings that have come along since, nobody's quite matched the ghostly horror of "The Mummy" in 1932. Nobody's even come close. This action feature stars Tom Cruise as a dashing thief who locates and digs up ancient artifacts and sells them to the highest bidder. He's also in the Army, a plot point that makes little sense to begin with and gets dropped along the way. Tom's in Iraq, where he's dodging bombs and bullets on the way to unearthing an ancient Egyptian burial chamber. (Egypt's a few hundred miles from Iraq, but, oh, never mind.) There he finds, preserved in mercury, the sarcophagus of an ancient Egyptian princess who did something terrible a few thousand years ago and was cursed and buried alive. Also, there's a cute archeologist played by Annabelle Wallis, because, really, don't all female archeologists look like dishy blonde movie stars? So Tom and the archeologist fly the mummy off to London, where there's another burial chamber filled with the corpses of crusaders, and it doesn't take long for the dead to come back to life and wreak havoc among the living. This isn't a horror movie as much as it is a special effects show. There's nothing in it that's the least bit new or original or scary, and in an age of visual overkill, even the effects aren't that special. (I did like the part where Tom gets attacked by a horde of rats.) The rampaging crusaders look like George Romero's zombies as imagined by Ray Harryhausen, and Tom looks like he's in great shape, but his eternal youthfulness is starting to suggest that he's maybe had some help along the way. I'm not sure that's the case, but men in their mid-50s, even well preserved ones, don't typically resemble fratboys on their way to spring break. Maybe there's a Dorian Gray thing going on there, or maybe all that Scientology has a Botoxing effect. Russell Crowe plays Dr. Henry Jekyll, and while the connection with Robert Louis Stevenson is minimal, at least you know he had a good time. The folks at Universal are obviously hoping to kick off a franchise here, but if they really want that to happen, they'd better do better than this. Boris Karloff, rest in peace.

JFK (1991)

JFK  (1991)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Oliver Stone
    Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Kevin Bacon,
    Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Oldman,
    Michael Rooker, Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon,
    Ed Asner, Walter Matthau, Vincent D'Onofrio,
    Joe Pesci, Sally Kirkland, Brian Doyle-Murray
For a generation of kids who were in high school then or younger, the death of John F. Kennedy was the first defining historical event of our lives. We were shocked. Oliver Stone was one of those kids, too, and he leaves no conspiracy theory unturned in his dramatized speculation on what might've happened that day in Dallas in 1963. Kevin Costner plays New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who became obsessed with the assassination and kept the investigation going for years. What he came up with was inconclusive. That the Warren Commission's judgments are suspect doesn't come as a big surprise, and there's more than enough circumstantial evidence and shady behavior to make you wonder. But there's no solid proof of anything, either, which leaves Garrison at the end making his argument in court just to get it on the record in a case he knows he can't win. Maybe the truth will come out someday, when those secret files the government has locked up are finally released. But don't count on it. It's Costner who really carries this, and it's not hard to see earlier movie heroes in his performance. Sitting on a porch swing with his kids, he's Atticus Finch. Making his climactic plea in the courtroom, his voice cracking with emotion, he's Jefferson Smith. Donald Sutherland, playing this movie's equivalent of Deep Throat, pretty much owns the ten minutes he's in, and Gary Oldman could pass for a clone of Lee Harvey Oswald. In a final bit of casting irony, Garrison himself plays Earl Warren.