The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960)

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ADAM AND EVE  (1960)  ¢
    D: Albert Zugsmith, Mickey Rooney
    Mamie Van Doren, Martin Milner, Mickey Rooney, 
    Fay Spain, Cecil Kellaway, Tuesday Weld,
    Mel Tormé, Paul Anka, June Wilkinson
An idiotic sex farce with Marty and Mamie as stranded bus passengers who dream themselves back to the Garden of Eden. Mickey Rooney's the Devil and Fay Spain plays Lilith. (Who knew there were leotards in the Stone Age?) Milner gamely gives it a shot, but the script won't give him (or anybody) a break. Van Doren's platinum tresses keep her golden globes strategically covered, and Rooney gives the kind of performance that suggests directing himself was probably not a good idea.

The Bad Batch (2016)

THE BAD BATCH  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ana Lily Amirpour
    Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves,
    Jim Carrey, Diego Luna, Giovanni Ribisi
A woman named Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) gets dropped off on the far side of a chain-link  border fence, where a sign lets her know she's not in Texas anymore. She's got a sandwich and a gallon of water and nothing to guide her through what appears to be a million square miles of desert except a cryptic instruction: FIND COMFORT. Which she does, eventually, but not before being captured by cannibals who relieve her of an arm and a leg. This is a little like a Mad Max movie, but without the vroom vroom. It's alternately strange, unsettling, hallucinatory, and whenever Keanu Reeves is saying anything at all, ridiculous. Reeves plays a Jim Jones-style cult leader with a harem of visibly pregnant young women. ("Mad Max: Fury Road" had a similar thing going on.) Jim Carey's a ragged hermit. Giovanni Ribisi plays a crazy person. Jason Momoa's the musclebound Miami Man, whose relationship with Arlen is complicated, starting with the fact that he's dined on her missing limbs. Thankfully, motor scooters, disco, LSD, copy machines and spaghetti are all available in this wasteland. There's some comfort in that, I guess. 

Rosebud (1975)

ROSEBUD  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Otto Preminger
    Peter O'Toole, Richard Attenborough, Cliff Gorman,
    Claude Dauphin, Raf Vallone, Peter Lawford,
    Isabelle Huppert, Kim Cattrall, John V. Lindsay
Palestinian terrorists abduct five women, all of them young and beautiful, the daughters of influential business and political leaders in Europe and the United States. Recruited to get them back is a rakish, chain-smoking agent named Larry Martin (Peter O'Toole), a Brit working for American intelligence while posing as a correspondent for Newsweek. Otto Preminger's next-to-last film isn't aiming for greatness, but it's not a bad piece of escapist cloak-and-dagger work, more European art film than James Bond. O'Toole's larky manner and movie-star looks make him an improbable spy, but he's never not fun to watch. The script is by Erik Lee Preminger, Otto's son by Gypsy Rose Lee, and the ending is borderline biblical, an eye for an eye, never-ending. 

Lion (2016)

LION  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Garth Davis
    Dev Patel, Sunny Powar, Rooney Mara,
    Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, Divian Ladwa
Somewhere in the vast expanse of India, a five-year-old boy named Saroo stows away in a decommissioned railroad car and falls asleep. By the time he wakes up, the car is locked and the train is moving, and when he finally gets out, two days and 1600 kilometers later, he's in Calcutta, with a legion of other lost children. Saroo's lot is luckier than most. After some hard time on the streets and a brief stint in a hellish orphanage, he's adopted by an Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and grows up to be played by Dev Patel. But he never stops feeling lost, or longing to get back home. The movie's about his search for a place he can barely remember and a mother he can never forget. It's a heroic journey, and a deeply compassionate look at what it's like to be displaced. Sunny Powar, who plays the young Saroo, is remarkable, and much of his story is told without words. Most of us have had a much less perilous time of it than Saroo. We don't even think about it all that much, but a significant part of our time on the planet, from where we start out to where we end up, is a matter of luck. A movie like this one can make you appreciate that. 

Listomania/Take 8

Multiple generations on the screen:

         
                       Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow

                       Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson

                       Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli

                       Maureen O'Sullivan and Mia Farrow

                       Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher

                       Tippi Hedren and Melanie Griffith

                       Ingrid Bergman and Isabella Rossellini

                       Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg

                       Tony  Curtis & Janet Leigh

                           and Jamie Lee Curtis

                       Bruce Dern & Diane Ladd

                           and Laura Dern

History of the World: Part I (1981)

HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART I  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mel Brooks
    Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Gregory Hines,
    Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Sid Caesar,
    Dom DeLuise, Ron Carey, Pamela Stephenson,
    Shecky Greene, Mary-Margaret Hughes, John Hurt,
    Leigh French, Hugh Hefner, Henny Youngman,
    Jackie Mason, Spike Milligan, Jack Carter,
    John Hillerman, Barry Levinson, Nigel Hawthorne,
    Rudy De Luca, Howard Morris, Michele Drake
Mel Brooks takes on the Stone Age, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution, with mixed comic results. When I first saw this during its original release, I didn't like it very much. Too many piss jokes maybe, or maybe I wasn't in the mood. Viewing it again a few decades later, it seems a lot funnier. Keep an eye out for the cameos, and remember, it's good to be the king. Orson Welles narrates.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

BLADE RUNNER 2049  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Denis Villeneuve
    Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford. Robin Wright,
    Jared Leto, Ana de Armas, Edward James Olmos,
    Dave Bautista, Sylvia Hoeks, Karla Juri, Sean Young
By the time the end credits rolled in "Blade Runner" back in 1982, hard-boiled L.A. cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) was about to go on the run with a replicant named Rachel (Sean Young), leaving behind four "retired" replicants and a clue to his own identity. The year (now closing in on us) was 2019. This sequel starts out 30 years after that, and the setting again is a teeming, grimy, dystopian Los Angeles. There's a newer, younger cop on the job and replicants are still being hunted, but the situation has gotten more complicated. The newer replicants are more advanced and self-aware, and may even be capable of reproduction. The key to the story again involves Deckard, now holed up by himself in an empty Las Vegas casino, his only companions a friendly black dog, a prodigious booze supply and holographic images of Elvis, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. His mood and outlook have not improved. Another thing that's different this time around is that Deckard's de facto replacement, a blade runner called "K", is a replicant himself and knows it. He's played by Ryan Gosling, who fits the role as perfectly as Ford did, and it's only a matter of time before the old blade runner and the new one meet up. The underlying theme again is what does it mean to be human, and when artificially engineered entities can think and do and feel everything that humans can, what's the difference? The movie is longer than the earlier one and the plotting is more complex - possibly a little too long and too complex. And like the original, it's moody and deliberate when most sci-fi movies are going for flashy and fast. It looks and sounds great - Hans Zimmer's musical score picks up where Vangelis left off - and the script doesn't underestimate (or insult) a viewer's intelligence. Could there be another sequel? The conclusion leaves enough elements in play to make a third chapter possible. But probably not with Harrison Ford, if they're going to wait another 30 years. 

Holiday Affair (1949)

HOLIDAY AFFAIR  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Don Hartman
    Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey,
    Gordon Gebert, Griff Barnett, Harry Morgan
Here's a movie that bombed at the box office because nobody in 1949 wanted to see tough guy Robert Mitchum in a light comedy. It's actually kind of a sweet little romance starring Janet Leigh as a young widow with a six-year-old son, Wendell Corey as the nice-guy lawyer she's been dating for a couple of years, and Mitchum as a would-be boat builder who drifts from job to job and spends most of his free time with the seals and squirrels at the Central Park Zoo. The casting tells you a lot in this case. Like, which of the two men do you think will end up with Janet Leigh? You don't need an encyclopedia to figure that out. 

The Desert Rats (1953)

THE DESERT RATS  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Wise
    Richard Burton, James Mason, Robert Newton,
    Torin Thatcher, Chips Rafferty, Robert Douglas
Richard Burton plays a British army officer assigned to lead a newly arrived company of Australian infantry against Rommel's German tank corps during the siege of Tobruk. The actors playing the Aussies look a little mature to be green recruits, but it's an exciting World War Two action movie, directed with an old editor's skill and economy by Robert Wise. Mason had played Rommel before in "The Desert Fox" (1951), and Burton, in the years before he hooked up with what's-her-name, was a commanding presence on screen. Michael Rennie narrates. 

Footnotes (2016)

FOOTNOTES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paul Calori, Kostia Testut
    Pauline Etienne, Olivier Chantreau, Francois Morel.
    Loïc Corbery, Julie Victor, Clémentine Yelnik,
    Vladimir Granov, Elodie Escarmelle, Eve Hanus
A French blue-collar musical about some women who revolt when they learn their jobs in a shoe factory are about to be outsourced to China. The filmmakers do nothing to romanticize working-class life. The women look like factory workers. You wouldn't mistake any of them for a fashion model or a movie star. Their surroundings are dreary and the work they do is monotonous. Their jobs are visibly using them up. But the alternative - unemployment or temporary, part-time, dead-end "mcjobs" - is worse. So you're not looking at "La La Land" here, even if the characters do occasionally break into song. "Footnotes" is definably less la la, and a whole lot more like life.

The Wind and the Lion (1975)

THE WIND AND THE LION  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Milius
    Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith,
    John Huston, Steve Kanaly, Geoffrey Lewis
Early in the 20th century, a Berber chieftain with a distinct Scottish brogue kidnaps an American heiress, creating an international stir that plays into Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for the White House. In the wake of the Spanish American War, the age of American imperialism was just getting started, and John Milius would be the right guy to make a movie about that, but this one goes on a little too long, and it's not entirely clear why American troops led by Captain Steve Kanaly are being ordered to storm the bashaw's palace, or how we're supposed to feel about that. The desert scenery is beautiful, though, and Connery and Bergen make an attractive, bickering couple playing out a not-quite-romance. Best of all is Brian Keith's larger-than-life performance as Roosevelt. (When Teddy's sharing the screen with a giant stuffed bear, it's not hard to see the similarity.) Only in a movie like this one would a heroine as fair-haired and pale-skinned as Candice Bergen look so elegantly perfect after riding a horse all day with a band of Berber warriors through the dust and heat of the Sahara without a hat.

Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)

GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Simon Curtis
    Domnhall Gleeson, Will Tillston, Margot Robbie,
    Kelly McDonald, Alex Lawther, Stephen Campbell Moore
A movie about how A.A. Milne, successful playwright and shell-shocked World War One vet, came to write "Winnie the Pooh". More importantly, it's about the impact the book's publication and an obscene amount of media attention had on his son, nicknamed Billy Moon, but better known to everybody as Christopher Robin. It's one of those British period productions that looks just swell, and the script mostly hits the right notes, but something about it leaves you feeling less than totally engaged. Will Tillston plays the title role through most of it, and with his cute bowl haircut and dimples, he's exactly the way you'd expect a movie producer to want Christopher Robin to look. He's boringly perfect. Domnhall Gleeson plays Milne, standoffish and a little cold, even when he and Billy are having fun together. Margot Robbie, as Mrs. Milne, is simply horrid. Good thing Billy's got a loving nanny (Kelly McDonald) to provide some real affection. Despite it all, childhood was good for Billy, mostly. As he says looking back late in the movie, it was growing up that was hard. He survived, though, served in World War Two, and according to a title at the end, wound up running a bookstore. He never took a penny from the fortune that came from his father's bestselling books. 

Lord Jeff (1938)

LORD JEFF  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Wood
    Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney, Charles Coburn,
    Herbert Mundin, Terry Kilburn, Gale Sondergaard,
    George Zucco, Monty Wooley, Peter Lawford
Freddie Bartholomew plays a snooty young con artist who gets sent off to a military boarding school for his role in a jewelry store theft. His affected, high-brow manner does not go over too well with the working-class kids at the school, and life lessons are learned. It's all pretty obvious, but nicely done. Interesting for the pairing of '30s child stars Rooney and Bartholomew, whose voices were changing by then, and whose career tracks would soon diverge. Bartholomew was all but finished in films by the mid-1940s, while Rooney would continue to turn up on screen well into the 21st century.

Better Watch Out (2017)

BETTER WATCH OUT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Chris Peckover
    Olivia DeJonge, Levi Miller, Dacre Montgomery,
    Virginia Madsen, Patrick Warburton, Ed Oxenbould
A 12-year-old boy (he's almost 13) and the babysitter he lusts after (she's five years older) are settling in for an evening of pizza and movies, when they start to see and hear things that suggest they're not alone in the house. Which sounds like slasher movie formula #23, right up to the point where the plot takes a hairpin turn and you suddenly find yourself in "Funny Games" territory. The result is sometimes funny and sometimes disturbing, but it's still a slasher movie, which means that characters are occasionally required to do stuff that nobody outside a slasher movie, no matter how drunk or stupid, would do. Olivia DeJonge, who plays the babysitter, was about 17 when she made this, and at the beginning at least, she looks it. By the end, she doesn't look a day under 30. Rough night, I guess. Better watch out.

Uncle Tom's Crabbin' (1927)

UNCLE TOM'S CRABBIN'  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Otto Messmer
A Felix the Cat cartoon in which Felix goes down South, where happy black folks play music and dance and a villainous white guy with a whip tries to lay down the law. As an exercise in racial stereotyping, it's not a product of its time as much as a throwback to the previous century, but at least Felix comes down on the side of the characters making the music and not the guy with the whip. And being a Felix the Cat cartoon, it's surreal. Watch the way a frying pan morphs into a banjo and then a unicycle and then a longbow and then a tennis racket, all in a couple of minutes. And LSD hadn't even been invented back then. 

Bill Frisell: A Portrait (2017)

BILL FRISELL: A PORTRAIT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Emma Franz
Early on in this documentary, a fellow musician expresses the opinion that there simply isn't anybody who doesn't love Bill Frisell. After spending a couple of hours hanging out with Frisell and listening to him play, you'll know why that's true. He's the most unassuming guy you'd ever want to meet. Talking about his music, he's barely articulate. Playing it, he's the best there is. The film is practically wall-to-wall music: Frisell playing with various combinations of musicians in just about every genre imaginable. He's as prolific as he is versatile (he's played on virtually hundreds of albums), and the more you listen, the more you wonder if he's ever played a note on any of his many guitars that didn't sound good. Even his goofs sound good. If you're a fan, you won't want to miss this. If you're not, the movie could make you one.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

FRIENDLY PERSUASION  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: William Wyler
    Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins,
    Marjorie Main, Robert Middleton, Phyllis Love,
    Mark Richman, Walter Catlett, John Smith
A Quaker family in southern Indiana has to decide whether to take up arms in the Civil War. Homespun Americana in widescreen and color by De Luxe, idealized to the point where you wonder when the Rogers-and-Hammerstein songs are going to kick in. Cooper's the patriarch. McGuire's his wife and the movie's rock-ribbed pacifist conscience. Perkins plays their oldest son, and a pivotal supporting role is played by a goose. A great many "thee"s punctuate the script. Michael Wilson, who wrote it from Jessamyn West's novel, got an Oscar nomination, but no screen credit because of the blacklist.

Loving Vincent (2017)

LOVING VINCENT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dorota Korbiela, Hugh Welchman
    Douglas Booth, Chris O'Dowd, Eleanor Tomlinson,
    Aidan Turner, Saoirse Ronan, Jerome Flynn,
    Robert Gulaczyk, Robin Hodges, John Sessions
An animated mystery about a postmaster's son dispatched to deliver Vincent Van Gogh's last letter to his brother Theo, sometime after Vincent's death. Finding that Theo himself has died, the messenger ends up hanging around Auvers, talking to those who knew Vincent - all of them subjects in his paintings - and trying to piece together what happened in the last few weeks of the artist's life. What's revealed is a maze of conflicting stories, like "Rashomon" in oil on canvas, and visually that's exactly what the movie achieves. It was shot using real actors and then painted frame by frame in the style of Van Gogh. That required the work of more than 100 artists, making it the most labor-intensive case of rotoscoping ever, and the most literal example yet of images in paint coming to life. It's a magnificent eyeshow, especially on a big screen. Crows and wheat fields and sunflowers never looked so good.

Two Way Stretch (1960)

TWO WAY STRETCH  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Day
    Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Lionel Jeffries,
    Liz Fraser, Maurice Denham, Bernard Cribbens
Three cons closing in on their release dates sign on for a diamond heist for which they'll have the perfect alibi: They'll escape, pull off the job, and sneak back into prison before anybody knows they were gone. A pleasantly barmy British comedy in the combined spirit of Ealing, the "Carry On" films and Monty Python. Authority figures are more or less doomed in a movie like this. The more seriously they take themselves, the worse it's going to be for them. Lionel Jeffries, as a tyrannical prison guard, doesn't stand a chance.

Quote File/Take 12

Some lines from the screenplays of William Goldman:

"The future's all yours, ya lousy bicycles!"
  Paul Newman 
  in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

"I thought everyone knew that God was a 
  Scotsman."
  Sean Connery
  in "A Bridge Too Far"

"What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."
  Cary Elwes
  in "The Princess Bride"

"Do you want my signed confession now, 
  or after coffee?"
  Clint Eastwood to Ed Harris
  in "Absolute Power"

"Nothing much surprises me anymore, except 
  what people do to each other."
  Burt Reynolds
  in "Heat"

"If you want to understand me, watch my movies."
  Robert Downey Jr.
  in "Chaplin"

William Goldman

(1931-2018)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Luc Besson
    Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna,
    Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer
"Star Wars" meets "Avatar", more or less, in a sci-fi adventure about a couple of young space commandos whose mission is to, well, it's not entirely clear what their mission is, except to get into one scrape after another and look good doing it. So there are these creatures that look like an overfed Jar Jar Binks, and an even more grossly obese thing that could be the brother of Jabba the Hutt, and a race of skinny, peaceful, supersmart aliens, and a commander (called "The Commander") played by Clive Owen, who blew the aliens' planet to smithereens a while back, and now wants to kill the remaining aliens, who just want their planet back. Oh, and there's this little iguana-like creature that shits pearls, which comes in handy if, you know, you're running low on pearls. The visuals are cool. The storytelling's juvenile. The leads are attractive but bland. Rihanna does an eye-catching number as a shape-shifting pole dancer in a scene that makes you wonder whether maybe Besson didn't wish he was working with an R rating instead of a PG-13. Ethan Hawke appears briefly as Rihanna's pimp and gives the movie's most enjoyably crazed performance. 

Brief Moment (1933)

BRIEF MOMENT  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Burton
    Carole Lombard, Gene Raymond, Monroe Owsley,
    Donald Cook, Reginald Mason, Irene Ware
A nightclub singer marries a playboy, but his no-work-and-all-party lifestyle has an adverse effect on their relationship. There's a guy who runs a speakeasy who's crazy about her, but she's in love with the playboy, which is too bad, because she'd be better off with the speakeasy guy. Some women just fall for the wrong men, you know?

A Private War (2018)

A PRIVATE WAR  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Matthew Heineman
    Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander,
    Stanley Tucci, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Corey Johnson
A fragmented, hair-raising look at the work of war correspondents, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin, a reporter for Britain's Sunday Times, who covered every dangerous hot spot she could get to from 1986 till her death in 2012. Armed with a notebook and a Bic pen, a laptop  she's at odds with and plenty of cigarettes, Colvin turns up in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, dodging bullets and rocket fire every step of the way. It takes a toll. She loses an eye in a firefight (but looks great in an eyepatch), suffers from PTSD, and has a serious drinking problem. She's what used to be known as "a tough broad," but her gruff manner only partly masks the compassion that drives her work. She admits she hates being in war zones, but she keeps going back to them, specifically to the places where civilians are being targeted and slaughtered. "I want to tell the world your story," is her standard introduction to the broken, lost souls she writes about, and she does that, till an artillery round in Syria brings her life to a violent close. At a time when the bully in the White House routinely trashes journalists enemies of the people, it's good to be reminded (again) that the best of them are anything but. 

Taxi! (1932)

TAXI!  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roy Del Ruth
    James Cagney, Loretta Young, George E. Stone,
    Dorothy Burgess, Leila Bennett, Guy Kibbee 
Cagney plays a hot-headed cab driver who tangles with a syndicate out to run the independent taxis off the streets. Loretta Young plays his girl, who'd like him to be less impulsively violent. Cagney's performance is as physical as it is verbal. Acting as choreography. 

The Grandad (2014)

THE GRANDAD  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bjarni Thorsson
    Sigurdur Sigurjónsson, Sigrún Edda Björnsdóttir,
    Steinbór Hróar Steinbórsson, Tinna Sverrisdóttir
An Icelandic comedy about a civil engineer whose spiral into a late midlife crisis begins when his boss tells him he's being downsized to half-time. Besides which, he has prostate issues, his marriage has grown stale, his pregnant daughter's getting married to a guy he can't stand, and his golf game could use a little help. If a vehicle passes by in the background, more than likely it's a hearse. Sometimes this is deadpan funny. Sometimes it takes a silly joke and stretches it a little too thin. Sigurdur Sigurjónsson plays it all with a straight-faced fatalism that both expects very little and still somehow hopes for the best. Mostly it's a movie about waiting, not that everything comes to those who wait, but that something's got to, eventually.

The Immigrant (1917)

THE IMMIGRANT  (1917)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Charles Chaplin
    Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell,
    Henry Bergman, Kitty Bradbury, Albert Austin
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp gets on a boat bound for America in one of his classic two-reel comedies. It's really just two episodes - one on the boat at sea and the other in a restaurant after the ship's arrival - and you can see the potential for a much longer movie. (If he'd made it a few years later, it almost certainly would've been a feature.) Eric Campbell (of course) plays the restaurant waiter. Edna Purviance (of course) plays the girl.

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Aki Kaurismaki
    Sherwan Haji, Sakari Kuosmanen, Kati Outinen,
    Tommi Korpela, Nirz Haji, Simon Al-Bazoon
A Syrian refugee named Khaled stows away on a cargo ship and ends up in Helsinki, where he tries to adjust to life as a stranger in a strange land. It's Kaurismaki reworking the story he told in "Le Havre" (2011), and it's another tale about common humanity overcoming (at least some of the time) long and often inhuman odds. The humor's more deadpan than ever, and a lot of what happens isn't funny at all. Khaled won't give up, though, no matter how the fates (and racist thugs and indifferent bureaucrats) are knocking him around. Nothing that happens in Helsinki can possibly be worse than the horror he's left behind, and he knows it, and so he trudges on. Maybe that's the other side of hope. 

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA  (1970)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Sasdy
    Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford,
    Linda Hayden, Roy Kinnear, Ralph Bates,
    Peter Sallis, Martin Jarvis, John Carson, Isla Blair
Old Red Eyes is back.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Matthew Vaughn
    Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson,
    Sofia Boutella, Mark Strong, Michael Caine,
    Mark Hamill, Hanna Alström, Samantha Womack
Colin Firth plays an "Avengers"-style spy who recruits a scruffy, working-class street punk named Eggsy (Taron Egerton) for an elite espionage organization working out of a Savile Row tailor shop. Samuel L. Jackson playth a lithping villain who hath hatched a thcheme to dethroy the world, and only our newly minted spy kid can stop him. This is so transparently derived from the James Bond movies, it could almost be one, but not being stuck with all the baggage that goes with Bond, the filmmakers have more room to fool around, and they do. Watch spy commander Michael Caine order Eggsy to shoot his beloved dog. Watch the American president's head explode. Watch what happens when our hero does not stop Jackson in time to prevent his plot from going into effect. Watch the lovely Scandinavian princess Tilde (Hanna Alström) promise Eggsy he can penetrate her anally if he succeeds in saving the world. Watch how that motivates him. So, yeah, it's not always in good taste, depending on your idea of good taste. It's fun, though. If you're in the market for a comical, neo-Bond action movie (with exploding heads), "Kingsman" will definitely do.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Matthew Vaughn
    Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Colin Firth,
    Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum,
    Halle Berry, Hanna Alström, Michael Gambon,
    Bruce Greenwood, Emily Watson, Elton John
This movie starts out with a slam-bang car chase in which an impeccably groomed and tailored agent played by Taron Egerton takes on an ex-colleague with bad intentions and a bionic arm. Yes, Eggsy's back, and it's not long before the Princess Tilde (once again) offers to do something special for him if he succeeds (once again) in saving the world. She doesn't specify what that might be, but Eggsy knows, and if you saw the first "Kingsman" movie, so do you. Samuel L. Jackson doesn't appear in this one, except in a five-second flashback, which is just about enough. Instead, you get Julianne Moore as a witchy villain named Poppy, who has cornered the international market in recreational drugs and hatched a plan to blackmail the world into making everything legal. Colin Firth is back from the dead as Eggsy's mentor, Galahad, minus his memory and one eye. Mark Strong returns as Merlin, the savvy and indispensable functionary whose job is to keep the Kingsman agents on task and (more or less) in line. There are some new old faces (Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry, Emily Watson, Michael Gambon), all with too little to do, and Elton John (?!?) plays himself in a flamboyant cameo. With a running time of 2 hours and 21 minutes, it's too long by a lot, and what seemed fresh and funny the first time around has started to go stale. Way more of everything isn't always enough. 

Deadline U.S.A. (1952)

DEADLINE U.S.A.  (1952)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Brooks
    Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter,
    Ed Begley, Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart,
    Martin Gabel, Audrey Christie, Jim Backus
Humphrey Bogart plays the crusading editor of a big-city daily called The Day, and he's got a couple of pressing problems. One is a big story  his reporters are working on, an investigative piece that could bring down the criminal empire of a gangster played with humorless menace by Martin Gabel. The other is that the paper is about to be sold to a rival publisher whose plan is to eliminate the competition by shutting it down. It's a briskly told story and a passionate tribute to the imperfect but hard-working men and women of the fourth estate. Every newspaper drama that's come along since owes at least a passing nod to this one. And if you've never come across a case of death by printing press, that happens in this movie, too. 

The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

THE OLD MAN & THE GUN  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Lowery
    Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck,
    Tika Sumpter, Tom Waits, Danny Glover,
    Gene Jones, Ari Elizabeth Johnson, Keith Carradine
This movie opens with a title that's a direct throwback to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Toward the end, Casey Affleck does something that's a direct reference to "The Sting". Neither of those things is an accident, what with Robert Redford playing a courtly old outlaw who's spent his entire life either escaping from prison or robbing banks. Sissy Spacek plays a widow he connects with in between heists. Affleck plays the detective who's out to track him down. Like its protagonist, the film  moves about comfortably, taking its time. Whole long scenes are just Redford and Spacek hanging out in a booth in a diner, talking over coffee, and the chemistry seems so effortless, you wouldn't mind if they just went on and on. Sometimes it's enough just to look at them. Age lines and all, these are people who know what to do with a closeup. Redford announced his retirement from acting a few weeks before the picture's release, and he's never appeared more relaxed and at peace with himself. He's had a remarkable career, and this wouldn't be a bad note to bow out on, but if he should change his mind and decide to make a few more movies, and maybe rob a few more banks, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either. 

Screen Test / Take 11

Match the following incidents with the movies in which they occur:

  1. Gregory Peck goes to Mexico and gets shot.
  2. Groucho Marx plays God.
  3. Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling.
  4. Paul Newman eats 50 eggs.
  5. Harold Lloyd hangs from the face of a clock.
  6. Jimmy Cagney goes to the electric chair.
  7. Gary Cooper throws his badge in the dirt.
  8. Roman Polanski carves up Jack Nicholson's nose.
  9. Lauren Bacall asks Humphrey Bogart if he knows how to 
       whistle.
10. Alanis Morissette plays God.

                            a. "Safety Last"
                            b. "High Noon"
                            c. "Angels with Dirty Faces"
                            d. "Old Gringo"
                            e. "Royal Wedding"
                            f. "Dogma"
                            g. "Chinatown"
                            h. "To Have and Have Not"
                            i. "Skidoo"
                            j. "Cool Hand Luke"

        Answers:

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

High Anxiety (1977)

HIGH ANXIETY  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mel Brooks
    Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman,
    Cloris Leachman, Ron Carey, Howard Morris, 
    Dick Van Patten, Jack Riley, Charlie Callas,
    Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, Barry Levinson 
Mel mimics the Master, with conspicuous references to "Spellbound", "Psycho", "Vertigo" and "North By Northwest". Hitchcock himself enjoyed this one, and even offered Brooks a few story ideas. Mel's over-the-top Sinatra impression is a highlight, and when he takes a seat on a park bench and pigeons start to gather on the jungle gym in the background, you don't have to think too hard to know what's coming up next.

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016)

FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM
    D: David Yates                                                   (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell,
    Samantha Morton, Jon Voight, Dan Hedaya,
    Ron Perlman, Zoë Kravitz, Johnny Depp
A Hogwarts alumnus arrives in New York in 1926 with a suitcase full of strange creatures and bumps into a baker with an identical suitcase full of pastries and the suitcases get switched (of course) and the creatures get loose and start to run around the city and the local witches start running around trying to put them back or put them away and this is a prequel to the "Harry Potter" stories and the two ten-year-olds I watched it with were a lot more into it than I was which didn't surprise me really and I'm not even sure why the wizard with the suitcase full of creatures had come to New York in the first place but the kids knew and there are some cool special effects. 

Cannery Row (1982)

CANNERY ROW  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢    
    D: David S. Ward
    Nick Nolte, Debra Winger, M. Emmett Walsh,
    Frank McRae, Audra Lindley, Sunshine Parker
In the first paragraph of his 1945 novel, John Steinbeck describes Monterey's Cannery Row as many things, one of them being a dream. In David S. Ward's screen adaptation, the dream remains intact. The movie's based on two Steinbeck novels, "Cannery Row" and its sequel, "Sweet Thursday", published in 1954. The time frame in the film is indefinite, but looks like the late 1940s. The canneries are closed and there's not much work, and the two most visible segments of Cannery Row's resident population are hookers and bums. The outliers are Doc (Nick Nolte), a marine biologist who makes a living collecting specimens for other researchers, and Suzy (Debra Winger), a drifter from Indiana who's looking for waitress work, but settles for a stint in a cathouse. And there's the Seer, a brain-damaged visionary who lives in a shack on the bay and has a connection to Doc that Suzy eventually figures out. The sets are a character, too. They were created on an old MGM soundstage and there's something unreal about them. They're a part of the dream. Doc's storefront laboratory, the local diner, and the abandoned boiler Suzy moves into look small on the outside. Inside, you could throw a barn dance in them, and in Doc's place, they do. There's not much character development for most of the hookers and bums, and when M. Emmett Walsh sits down to play the piano, it's a little too obvious he's not really playing it. Which would probably bother me more if Nolte and Winger weren't so believably down-to-earth as Doc and Suzy. Both are damaged, their mutual attraction undercut by that and the fact that they can't agree on anything except the fact that they can't agree on anything. There's a scene where they challenge each other to a dance contest and do this clumsy jitterbug to Glenn Miller's "In the Mood". They're not any good, but neither of them will admit it, or give in, and you can see a lot of what's going on in their relationship in that stubborn, awkward dance. Plus, nobody ever looked sexier in pantaloons than Debra Winger. See for yourself.

The Lost City of Z (2016)

THE LOST CITY OF Z  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Gray
    Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller,
    Tom Holland, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid
A few years after the turn of the 20th century, a British army officer with a background in mapmaking heads up into the Amazon to explore an uncharted river. There he finds danger, disease, bad weather, restless natives and what appear to be clues to a lost civilization. Despite a wife and family back home and the untimely outbreak of World War One, he keeps going back. A long, deliberately paced, stiff-upper-lip adventure, apparently based on a true story from the golden age of exploration. It's never quite as engaging as you'd like it to be, and the cinematography gets a little murky sometimes, but the jungle stuff is suspenseful and the final image is haunting.

The Incredible Petrified World (1957)

THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD  (1957)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Jerry Warren
    John Carradine, Robert Clarke, Allan Windsor,
    Phyllis Coates, Sheila Noonan, George Skaff
The petrified world is a cave deep in the ocean, which is where some explorers end up when their diving bell malfunctions. A movie like this could really use a monster or two. All this one has is John Carradine, who doesn't even act scary in it, and some stock footage of a fight between a shark and a squid. That's better than nothing, I guess.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power (2017)

AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER  
    D: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk                              (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
A decade on from his Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore is still at it, traveling the world with is wonky PowerPoint presentation and telling anybody who will listen what climate change is doing to our world, and what we can do to keep it from killing us. Gore is probably the world's least charismatic politician and its least likely movie star, but there's no getting around his passion for his subject. The visual documentation he provides here is alarming: flooding in Manhattan at the site of the 9/11 Memorial, fish swimming in the streets of Miami, and record warm temperatures in Greenland causing glaciers to explode. The most visibly human image shows pedestrians trying to cross a city street in a place that's so hot the asphalt has melted. They slip and fall down, and in some cases, lose their shoes. The movie concludes with the climate accord in Paris, where Gore played a pivotal role by negotiating a deal between a solar tech company and the government of India that finally brought India on board. (Gore claims to be a recovering politician, but he clearly hasn't lost his skill at it.) Donald Trump's rejection of the climate treaty gets a mention here, but that's not really the point. The evidence is in, the rest of the world is moving on anyway, and anybody who ignores or denies what global warming could do to us at this late date is either delusional or a fucking idiot.

Babes In Arms (1939)

BABES IN ARMS  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Busby Berkeley
    Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Charles Winninger,
    Guy Kibbee, Margaret Hamilton, June Preisser 
Mickey and Judy and the rest of the kids want to put on a show, but Margaret Hamilton from the Welfare Society wants to send them off to a work school instead. Think these kids will end up at that work school? Don't bet on it. Judy sings a couple of tunes. Mickey impersonates Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore and FDR. The elaborate blackface production number is as lively as it is (these days) culturally offensive. 

Lizzie (2018)

LIZZIE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Craig William Macneill
    Chloe Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Jamey Sheridan,
    Fiona Shaw, Kim Dickens, Denis O'Hare
"Lizzie Borden took an axe . . . " and 126 years later, people are still making movies about her. In this tense, claustrophobic speculation on what might've happened back in 1892, Chloe Sevigny plays Lizzie and Kristen Stewart plays Bridget Sullivan, the Irish housemaid who goes to work for the Bordens just as things are about to get bloody. Both actresses are good, even if neither of them looks quite at home in the late 19th century. In the wake of the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing, the systematic abuse of women at the hands of privileged, powerful men has an immediacy the filmmakers might not have anticipated. 

Carry On Follow That Camel (1967)

CARRY ON FOLLOW THAT CAMEL  (1967)  ¢ ¢
    D: Gerald Thomas
    Phil Silvers, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,
    Jim Dale, Anita Harris, Peter Butterworth,
    Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, John Bluthal
The "Carry On" gang joins the French Foreign Legion, with Kenneth Williams as the commandant, Charles Hawtrey as his adjutant, and vacationing Yank Phil Silvers hamming it up as a lecherous drill sergeant. All of the "Carry On" movies are silly, but this one's more in the range of idiotic, and apart from a few shameless puns, it's not all that funny. Also, it's missing Sid James.

Eulogy (2004)

EULOGY  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Clancy
    Hank Azaria, Debra Winger, Zooey Deschanel,
    Glenne Headly, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie,
    Rip Torn, Rance Howard, Rene Auberjonois
"The Big Chill" meets "Rocket Gibraltar" in a comedy about the bickering members of a Rhode Island family getting together to mark (but not mourn) the death of their patriarch, played in a video clip by Rip Torn. The humor's as crazy as it is (sometimes) dark, and the Viking funeral that ends it all takes the concept of going out with a bang to its literal extreme.

The Last Gangster (1937)

THE LAST GANGSTER  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edward Ludwig
    Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, Rose Stradner,
    Lionel Stander, Douglas Scott, John Carradine,
    Sidney Blackmer, Grant Mitchell, Louise Beavers
A bootlegger starts a ten-year stretch on Alcatraz, just as his wife is about to give birth. He's a violent psychopath to begin with, and this sequence of events does not improve his disposition. A fast-paced crime melodrama, predictable but well-played, with a couple of unusual features: a) the shootouts all take place offscreen, and b) Jimmy Stewart with a mustache. Robinson takes a beating in this, and Carradine swipes a scene or two as a fellow inmate who doesn't like him very much.

Dunkirk (2017)

DUNKIRK  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Christopher Nolan
    Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh,
    Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Glynn-Carney,
    Barry Keoghan, Damien Bonnard, James Bloor
"Dunkirk" is like the Normandy Beach sequence in "Saving Private Ryan", if that sequence was the whole movie and went on for 106 minutes, For viewers who have never been shot at or  bombed, it's probably as close as a movie can get to duplicating that experience. It'a not all bullets and artillery fire, but it sure feels that way. It's intense. The film tells three stories simultaneously, each playing out on a different timeline. In one (a week), a grunt soldier played by Fionn Whitehead tries desperately to get off the beach and onto a boat any way he can. In another (a day), a civilian, played stoically by Mark Rylance, joins a convoy of commandeered boats to help with the evacuation. In the third (an hour), an RAF pilot played by Tom Hardy tries to provide air cover by knocking out as many German planes as he can before he runs out of fuel. Amazingly, the narrative works. Cutting from story to story and back again, you always know exactly where you are. The dialogue is spare. The actors, with a few notable exceptions, are not well known. The scale is both intimate and epic. There's no backstory at all. Not every character behaves heroically, but every character behaves in a believably human way. I watched it on an IMAX screen, which might not be necessary, but to really appreciate "Dunkirk", a big screen of some kind and a good sound system are essential. 

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

JAILHOUSE ROCK  (1957)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Thorpe
    Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, Vaughn Taylor,
    Dean Jones, Mickey Shaughnessy, Jennifer Holden
Elvis goes to prison for manslaughter, gets a haircut, shovels a little coal, and learns a few guitar chords from his cellmate (Mickey Shaughnessy). Then he gets out, meets a curvy record promoter, cuts a disc and turns into a real asshole, as success goes to his head. Most Elvis fans consider this his best movie, and if nothing else, it's a contrast to the candy-coated fluff he got stuck in later on. The title number is Elvis at his gyrating, hip-swiveling best. 

Ears (2016)

EARS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alessandro Aronadio
    Daniele Parisi, Silvia D'Amico, Rocco Papaleo,
    Pamela Villoresi, Ivan Franek, Andrea Purgatori
A man wakes up with ringing in his ears and finds a note on the refrigerator telling him his friend Luigi has died. The man has no idea who Luigi is, and as the day goes on without getting any better, the ringing in is ears does not go away. A deadpan comedy from Italy that plays like a bad dream that you wake up to, and then can't wake up from, because you're no longer asleep. The part with the card-eating ATM could happen to anybody, I suppose. The part where a doctor tells the man that the reason he's got tinnitus is because he's a hermaphrodite and he's pregnant is, well, yeah, more bizarre. Keep an eye on the aspect ratio, if you watch this on a screen that allows for that. 

Kongo (1932)

KONGO  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: William Cowan
    Walter Huston, Virginia Bruce, Conrad Nagel,
    Lupe Velez, C. Henry Gordon, Forrester Harvey
Walter Huston plays a white witch doctor who controls the natives with sugar cubes and magic tricks, while plotting revenge on the rubber plantation owner who stole his wife and crippled him. Lurid, pre-Code pulp, a batshit exercise in unrelieved sensationalism that would've horrified the moralists of the 1930s. (Not surprisingly, it suggests a lot more than it actually delivers.) Conrad Nagel battles drug addiction. Virginia Bruce goes from convent-bred innocence to sin and degradation. Lupe Velez tempts all the menfolk and shimmers in the heat (and how'd she get to this African jungle?) A remake of the 1928 Lon Chaney vehicle "West of Zanzibar". 

West of Zanzibar (1928)

WEST OF ZANZIBAR  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tod Browning
    Lon Chaney, Lionel Barrymore, Mary Nolan,
    Warner Baxter, Jacqueline Daly, Roscoe Ward
A typically sick and twisted story from Browning and Chaney, with Chaney as a magician who goes to great (and tragic) lengths to get even with the man who crippled him. Chaney, working without a lot of makeup, gives one of his best performances. A sound remake, called "Kongo", came out in 1932.

The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mark Dindal
An absolute monarch, the ruler over everything he sees, learns a few life lessons (but not right away) when he drinks a magic potion and turns into a llama. It's the voice work that distinguishes this animated feature, with David Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton all perfectly cast. The studio's Disney. The location's ancient Peru. Some of the music's by Sting.

Quote File / Take 11

Some lines from the movies of Burt Reynolds:

"You don't beat it. You don't beat this river."

  Reynolds in "Deliverance"

"If it looks like shit, and it sounds like shit, then it 
  must be shit."

  Reynolds in "Boogie Nights"

"Celestial roulette. That's what life is all about. 
  Celestial roulette."

  Reynolds in "Big City Blues"

"I made so many mistakes, and now it's time for 
  one last goodbye."

  Reynolds in "The Last Movie Star"

"Now let's make a movie."

  Reynolds in "Frankenstein and Me"

(1936-2018)

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)

DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Carl Reiner
    Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Reni Santoni, 
    Carl Reiner, George Gaynes, Frank McCarthy
Hard-boiled gumshoe Rigby Reardon tries to crack a tough case, but the streets are dark and dangerous, corruption is everywhere, nobody can be trusted, and naturally there's a dame involved. This movie plays off a gimmick, but the gimmick's a good one: editing Steve Martin into scenes with Bogart, Stanwyck, Lancaster and other black-and-white stars from the '40s. It's a safe bet Mel Brooks would've made a film-noir parody eventually, but this time his old pal Carl Reiner beat him to it. 

Logan (2017)

LOGAN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Mangold
    Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen,
    Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant
This is what it looks like when you're a superhero growing old, when you start needing glasses to read the label on a pill bottle and you walk with a limp and you can't hide the scars anymore. When you can still sometimes stomp the bad guys, but sometimes, now, they stomp you. When you start to realize that time, after all, is limited and you feel mortality closing in. The superhero in question is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and you can bet he's not going down without a fight. And since this battle's R-rated, it's going to be a bloody one. (The language is R-rated, too.) The story's like where a Marvel comic meets "Midnight Special", with Logan/Wolverine and old Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) on the run with a girl who has certain unique gifts not unlike Wolverine's. It would seem to be the last X-Men adventure for Jackman and Stewart, and a potential opening for a whole new series, with the girl (Dafne Keen) and a band of youthful colleagues very much in play. For Jackman as Wolverine, it's a high note to go out on. Every aging superhero should be so lucky.