8 Mile (2002)

8 MILE  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Curtis Hanson
    Eminem, Kim Basinger, Brittany Murphy,
    Mekhi Phifer, Evan Jones, Eugene Byrd,
    Anthony Mackie, Taryn Manning, Michael Shannon

Brothahs and sistahs, it's your main man Nick,
Gonna spin a little rap about this here flick. 
It's all about a white kid in Detroit City,
Got a dead-end job and his life is lookin' shitty.
He lives in a trailer park and that's no good,
So he hangs with the homies at a club in the 'hood.
He might  be a honky, but he knows the lingo.
His mother (Kim Basinger) likes to play bingo.
Now the cat's big dream is to be a star rapper.
If he can't cut that, then his future's in the crapper.
So he gets on stage where he freezes and chokes,
And the folks in the audience laugh and make jokes. 
Then he goes through all kinds of toil and trouble.
Gonna take more than ridicule to bust his bubble. 
And after watchin' lots of real bad shit pass,
He picks up the mike again and really kicks ass.
By now you've prob'ly guessed that this is Eminem's movie.
In the language of the '60s you could call it kinda groovy.
The story's pretty basic and you've seen it all before,
But this Marshall Mathers kid really nails it to the door.
He plays it low-key, a kind of hip-hop zen.
Makes you wonder what he'll do when he gets to mile ten.

In the spirit of the New Year and as a gift to the rest of the human race, the Movie Buzzard resolves not to try to write any more rap lyrics for the foreseeable future. 

Black Sabbath (1963)

BLACK SABBATH  (1963)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mario Bava
    Boris Karloff, Mark Damon, Michèle Mercier,
    Lidia Alfonsi, Susy Andersen, Jacqueline Pierreux
Three tales of the supernatural, introduced by (who else?) Boris Karloff, which is a little like watching three episodes of Karloff's old "Thriller" television show. In the first segment, a nurse steals a ring from the finger of a corpse, and lives (but not long) to regret it. The second has a woman terrorized by a voice on the telephone. The third is a vampire story starring Boris himself. Ironically, that one's the least frightening. The first is the shortest and the best. 

Men In Black 3 (2012)

MEN IN BLACK 3  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Barry Sonnenfeld
    Will Smith, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Eve,
    Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Thompson
The guys in the black suits are back, with Agent J (Will Smith) going back in time to 1969 to save the world, as well as the life of his surly partner, Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). Josh Brolin plays the younger Agent K, and it's brilliant casting, while the premise allows for a revelation at the end that opens a whole new window on the relationship between the two agents. The rest is the usual summertime blast of special effects, with a new icky creature being blown to pieces every so often to hold the attention of viewers who really aren't interested in anything else. My favorite: the giant mutant fish thing that tries to devour Agent J.

The Woman In White (1948)

THE WOMAN IN WHITE  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Godfrey
    Eleanor Parker, Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet,
    Gig Young, Agnes Moorehead, John Abbott
A movie based on the Wilkie Collins novel about a mysterious woman who seems to hold the key to a plot that involves blackmail, larceny, mistaken identity and murder. My colleague Ms. Applebaum has read the book and says the film departs from it in significant ways, but the movie holds up fine on its own. Sydney Greenstreet as the treacherous Count Fosco is one of the most sinister villains ever, but his wife is played by Agnes Moorehead, which at least makes it a fair fight. 

Bad Santa (2003)

BAD SANTA  (2003)  ¢ ¢
    D: Terry Zwigoff
    Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Bernie Mac,
    Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, John Ritter
What if you took your kid to the store to see Santa Claus, and Santa turned out to be a mean, belligerent, foul-mouthed, antisocial, smelly, womanizing, safe-cracking, alcoholic bum? That's the joke in this sour, one-joke comedy, a shot of vitriol to counter the annual onslaught of holiday cheer. Santa gets drunk. Santa chain-smokes cigarettes. Santa stumbles around and acts like an asshole and uses words like "shit" and "fuck" in every goddamn sentence, and after a while you kind of get numb to it all. There's a nice payoff late in the film, though, if you make it that far. It happens when Santa, on the run from the cops after a botched burglary, gets gunned down trying to deliver a little stuffed elephant to the only kid on his Christmas list. Now that's funny. I realize I just gave away the ending, but trust me, you're not going to have enough invested in this guy to care want happens to him anyway. Merry Christmas.

Screen Test / Take 10

Match the following actresses with the movies in which they played opposite Cary Grant:

                              1. Ingrid Bergman
                              2. Grace Kelly
                              3. Sophia Loren
                              4. Eva Marie Saint
                              5. Mae West
                              6. Leslie Caron
                              7. Deborah Kerr
                              8. Doris Day
                              9. Marlene Dietrich
                            10. Marilyn Monroe

                              a. "That Touch of Mink"
                              b. "I'm No Angel"
                              c. "An Affair To Remember"
                              d. "Notorious"
                              e. "Father Goose"
                               f. "To Catch a Thief"
                              g. "Monkey Business"
                              h. "Blonde Venus"
                               i. "Houseboat"
                               j. "North By Northwest"

        Answers:

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

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

THE GRAPES OF WRATH  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Ford
    Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine,
    Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon, Russell Simpson,
    John Qualen, Eddie Quillen, Darryl Hickman,
    Ward Bond, Charles Middleton, Mae Marsh
John Steinbeck's epic story about a family of Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl for the promise of a better life in California, brought to the screen by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as proletarian hero Tom Joad. Movies don't get much more American than that.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)

THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS 
    D: Pare Lorentz                     (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
The irony in that title is in the use of the word "broke". A landmark documentary about how we created the Dust Bowl by turning over millions of acres of grassland (in a region that didn't get much rain) for the mass production of wheat. You'd expect a movie produced for the New Deal to end on a note of hope. Most of them do. This one doesn't, and I'm not sure it could. At the time of its release, farmers on the plains were still going broke, the land was still blowing away, and the Okies in their jalopies were still on the road heading west, the exodus in progress. You can bet John Ford watched this movie a time or two before he went to work on "The Grapes of Wrath".

The River (1938)

THE RIVER  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pare Lorentz
A Depression-Era documentary about the Mississippi River as both a magnificent resource and a mechanism for catastrophe. Or what happens when you log all the trees off the hills, and it rains, and the rain with nothing to stop it runs down to the river on its way to the sea. The narrative's repetitive and relentless. There's an inevitability about the way the words tumble over each other and double back to tumble over each other again that reflects the cycles of nature. The things we control and those we can't. The horrific collision of weather, erosion and greed. Stuff we ignore at our peril. 

The Great Flood (2012)

THE GREAT FLOOD  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Morrison
It might not have matched the scale of Noah's Ark, but for those who were caught up in it, the flood that devastated the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1927 was epic enough. More than 23,000 square miles of land ended up under water. A million people were displaced. Buster Keaton even changed the climax in "Steamboat Bill Jr." from a flood to a windstorm because of it. This movie is no Ken Burns-style history of the flood. It's an artful impression of what all that water did to the houses, farms, towns and lives that stood in its path. The footage is entirely archival, and some of the images have all but disintegrated, creating an eerie sense of time passing, memory fading, a cataclysmic event slipping away into history, the record forever imperfect and incomplete. There's no narration. No witnesses. No talking heads. Just a few chapter titles and a jazz score by Bill Frisell. The music's anachronistic, but it works. References to Jerome Kern's "Old Man River" come and go throughout. Parallels to Hurricane Katrina and the recent disasters in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico are inescapable. 

Bright Eyes (1934)

BRIGHT EYES  (1934) ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Butler
    Shirley Temple, James Dunn, Judith Allen,
    Jane Withers, Lois Wilson, Charles Sellon
Shirley Temple sings "On the Good Ship Lollipop". What else do you need to know?

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Antoine Fuqua
    Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke,
    Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-Hun Lee, Haley Bennett,
    Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard
Seven dudes with guns (and knives and arrows and hairpins and dynamite) take on a mercenary army under the command of an asshole millionaire played with unalloyed nastiness by Peter Sarsgaard. This might not match the artistry of its original source (Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai"), or the collective star power of the 1960 John Sturges film, but it's an exciting, action-packed, morally unambiguous western, a point in favor of the argument that not all remakes are a bad thing. Nobody had heard of a spaghetti western when Sturges made his "Magnificent Seven", and this version contains conspicuous references to "A Fistful of Dollars" and "High Plains Drifter", among others. Denzel Washington has the old Yul Brynner role, and he's gotta be the coolest cat on the frontier, an African-American paladin in an all-black getup on a shiny black horse. He's the leader, of course, but your attention keeps being diverted to the gang's other members, especially Ethan Hawke, Chris Pratt and Byung-Hun Lee. That happens in the Sturges movie, too, with Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve McQueen. James Horner composed the musical score - his last - and Elmer Bernstein's iconic title theme from 1960 breaks out at the end, because, you know, you couldn't remake "The Magnificent Seven" without it, really.

A Night At the Opera (1935)

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA  (1935)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Wood
    The Marx Brothers, Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones,
    Margaret Dumont, Walter King, Sigfried Ruman
Groucho, Harpo and Chico tear up the opera word. The Marx Brothers' first movie at MGM, and the only picture they made there that comes close to their earlier work at Paramount. The stateroom scene is legendary.

Trumbo (2015)

TRUMBO  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Roach
    Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Michael Stuhlbarg,
    Helen Mirren, David James Elliott, Alan Tudyk,
    Dean O'Gorman, Christian Berkel, Louis C.K.
As this movie opens, it's 1947 and Dalton Trumbo's in Louis B. Mayer's office signing a contract making him the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Trumbo's left-wing politics are no secret, but this is America, and he's living the good life in sunny California with a house on a lake, three nice kids, a wife played by Diane Lane and an infinite supply of booze and cigarettes. What could go wrong? A lot, of course. The Red Scare is getting into gear, and it's not long before Trumbo's being trashed in the press, called before Congress, and hauled off to prison for holding and expressing unpopular views. That's America, too, sometimes. The rest of the movie is Trumbo against the blacklist, but there are other players involved, actors, directors and fellow writers, all doing whatever they can to get through a terrible time, if not with honor, then at least with their families, lives and careers intact. Bryan Cranston plays Trumbo, blunt, caustic, literate and self-righteous, a pain in the neck to live with and an annoyance even to those who support his cause. Helen Mirren does a venomous bit as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and John Goodman steals a scene or two as a poverty-row producer who hires Trumbo to write shit screenplays under numerous fake names. How Cranston managed to dodge cancer and emphysema while smoking his way through this is anybody's guess.