Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)

WINDY RILEY GOES HOLLYWOOD  (1931)  ¢ 1/2
    D: William Goodrich (Roscoe Arbuckle)
    Jack Shutta, Louise Brooks, William Davidson,
    Dell Henderson, Wilbur Mack, Walter Merrill
An obnoxious wise guy on a cross-country road trip takes a wrong turn and ends up in Hollywood. Louise Brooks plays an actress who's one scandal away from sinking her career, a plot point both she and her director could probably relate to. A dismally unfunny two-reel comedy, notable only for the participation of Arbuckle behind the camera and Brooks (too briefly) in front of it. Both were playing out a weary last act in their own careers, and the movie stands as a testament to the capacity and willingness of Hollywood to let talent go to waste. 

Curses (1925)

CURSES  (1925)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: William Goodrich (Roscoe Arbuckle)
    Al St. John, Bartine Burkett, 
    Walter C. Reed, John Sinclair
A spoof on cliff-hanger adventure serials, complete with a heroine named Little Nell, who ends up tied to a log inching ever closer to the whirling blade of a sawmill. She also makes lethal flapjacks.

Coney Island (1917)

CONEY ISLAND  (1917)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Roscoe Arbuckle
    Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Al St. John,
    Alice Mann, Agnes Neilson, Luke the Dog
Knockabout, falling-down slapstick with Arbuckle, Keaton and St. John as three guys on the make at Coney Island. It's early Keaton and you can actually see him laughing in it, which makes it a real curiosity. A lot of the humor revolves around Arbuckle in drag. Filmed on location. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2  (2017) 
    D: James Gunn                                              ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista,
    Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker,
    Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell,
    Elizabeth Debecki, Chris Sullivan, Sylvester Stallone
I am Groot.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

FITZCARRALDO  ((1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Werner Herzog
    Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy,
    Paul Hittscher, Miguel Ángel Fuentes, Grande Othelo,
    Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez, Peter Berling
At what point does art cross over into madness? At what point does madness become art? And when do the two become indistinguishable? Take "Fitzcarraldo". It stars Klaus Kinski, who was mad as a hatter, or at least knew how to act that way, as a mad-eyed adventurer obsessed with the idea of bringing grand opera to the Amazon jungle. To do that, he buys a gigantic derelict steamboat, fixes it up, sails it upstream, and recruits a tribe of headhunters to haul it up and over a mountain to another river. To get all that in the movie, director Werner Herzog did the same thing. No effects, no models, real tribesmen, a real jungle and a 320-ton boat. The result is both breathtaking and hair-raising. Trees are felled, logs are planed, pulleys strain, cables creak and snap, the boat like some great hulking beast crawls its way up through the mud, and how Herzog accomplished all of that without getting everybody killed is hard to imagine. The danger looks way too real. German engineering, I suppose. So you've got a character who's nuts, played by an actor who's certifiable, and a filmmaker who's gone a little too far up the river himself. It's a movie about the madness of its own making. You can see it right there on the screen. It's insane. It's heroic. It's like nothing else.

The Theory of Everything (2014)

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Marsh
    Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox,
    David Thewlis, Emily Watson, Simon McBurney
This movie has at its heart two outstanding performances: Eddie Redmayne as cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Hawking's wife Jane. Hawking's still in his 20s, a gawky math-and-science geek carousing his way through Oxford, when he catches the eye of Jane Wilde, and she catches his. They hit it off, but before long Hawking gets the bad news you know is coming: He's diagnosed with motor neuron disease, which he's told will kill him within two years. Hawking refuses to give up, and Jane refuses to give up on Hawking, and Hawking famously continued thinking and writing, while getting around in a motorized wheelchair and speaking through a computerized voice apparatus, till his death last week at 76. Marsh's direction is smart and polished, hitting the emotional keys where that's inevitable, while Redmayne's performance - and Hawking's complex and sometimes difficult personality - keeps the sentimentality under control. (Hawking can be selfish, arrogant and cruel, but he's also wickedly funny.) What you're left with is the dramatized account of a remarkable life - actually two of them. When you look at what Hawking was able to do, and what he had to overcome to do it, you wonder what the world would look like if those of us who are twice as lucky could accomplish half as much.

Stephen Hawking

(1942-2018)

The Broadway Melody (1929)

THE BROADWAY MELODY  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Harry Beaumont
    Bessie Love, Anita Page, Charles King, Jed Prouty,
    Kenneth Thompson, Edward Dillon, Mary Doran
A sister act from the sticks lands in New York, determined to make it on Broadway. They get there, learning a few hard lessons along the way. This was MGM's first real talkie, and the first sound film to win the Academy Award for best picture. It's all kind of overwrought and obvious, but the scale's impressive, and Bessie Love earned an Oscar nomination playing the more clear-headed of the two sisters. Movie musicals would get a lot more lively over the next few years, as sound cameras became more mobile, and especially after the arrival of Busby Berkeley.

The Hero (2017)

THE HERO  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Brett Haley
    Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Nick Offerman,
    Krysten Ritter, Katharine Ross, Max Gail
In what stands to be a career-defining role, Sam Elliott plays Lee Hayden, an aging Hollywood actor who spends his days hanging out at his house in Malibu, huffing prodigious amounts of marijuana and trying to sidestep his fading career, his failure as a parent and the news that he now has terminal cancer. Lee's professional reputation rests on work he did long ago: one good big-screen movie called "The Hero", and a TV series called "Trail Drive" that lasted 13 weeks. These days if he gets work at all, it's doing commercials for barbecue sauce. Haley wrote the movie with Elliott in mind, and it's hard to imagine Lee's lines being delivered by anybody else. There are times when the script feels scripted, but Haley's direction and Elliott's performance keep the emotional give-and-take honest. An exchange toward the end between Lee and his daughter (Krysten Ritter) is a case in point. They're standing by the ocean, painfully hashing over their broken relationship. She does most of the talking, but her gaze stays fixed on the water. She hardly looks at him at all. He barely speaks, but he can't stop looking at her. Elliott plays the scene (as he does much of the movie) in tight closeup, and you don't need a lot of dialogue to see the love and aching loss in the old man's eyes. Great movie actors can do stuff like that. One of them's Sam Elliott.

Bad Girls (1994)

BAD GIRLS  (1994)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jonathan Kaplan
    Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore,
    Mary Stuart Masterson, James Russo, Dermot Mulroney,
    James Le Gros, Robert Loggia, Cooper Huckabee
Popcorn feminism on the frontier, starring Andie, Madeleine, Mary and Drew as hookers who go on the run after one of them shoots an abusive customer. This lifts several plot points from "The Wild Bunch", and if the result falls short of greatness, you can't fault the source material. Spending 90 minutes in the company of these four women is no hardship, either, though the frequency with which characters are captured and then have to be rescued gets a little repetitive. My colleague Dr. Sporgersi insists it's worth watching this just for the scenes in which Madeleine Stowe rides a horse. 

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Morrison
This might be the ultimate found-footage movie, because the found footage in question is real. In 1978, a backhoe operator digging up a vacant lot behind a casino in Dawson City, Canada, unearthed a trove of nitrate film reels, all dating back to the silent era and all of them long believed lost. How the movies got to such a remote outpost, why they stayed there, their miraculous survival and accidental recovery, is the subject of this documentary, a story of hardship, greed, opportunity, shifting fortunes, a hockey rink, a swimming pool, a library and the Klondike Gold Rush. It's told with titles rather than a voiceover narration, using neatly edited clips from the found films, and Alex Somers' hypnotic musical score is an eerie match for the decaying images on the screen. If there's a counterpoint to the elation that goes with a find like this, it's knowing that many more reels, hundreds of them, simply went out with the trash, burned or thrown in the river ages ago, the films they contained, like the gold in the Yukon, gone.

Devil Girl From Mars (1954)

DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS  (1954)  ¢ ¢
    D: David MacDonald
    Patricia Laffan, Hazel Court, Adrienne Corri,
    Hugh McDermott, Peter Reynolds, Joseph Tomelty,
    John Laurie, Sophie Stewart, Anthony Richmond
A flying saucer with a robot and a witchy alien on board touches down on the moors of Scotland, just a stone's throw away from a pub. Good thing the pub has a well-stocked bar.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

ATOMIC BLONDE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Leitch
    Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan,
    John Goodman, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella,
    James Faulkner, Til Schweiger, Barbara Sukowa
Action-fantasy, spy-vs.-spy stuff, with Charlize Theron as a stiletto-heeled agent dispatched to Berlin just as the Wall's about to come down. James McAvoy plays a fellow agent who's been in the city long enough to go native, working the black market and playing all sides against each other. He knows the place and understands its corruption, and he works for MI6, too, but can he be trusted? Well, no, but neither can anybody else. The plot plays like recycled John Le Carré, walking a narrow line between intricate and incomprehensible. It doesn't matter. The movie's all about style, from its muted colors to the emphatic way its characters drink and smoke to the ice water Theron bathes in to the brutal efficiency of the fight scenes. As an action figure, Charlize proves again she's the real deal, playing a character who can absorb insane amounts of punishment and still get up and kick ass. Beat her half to death and you'll just make her mad. Then she'll get even. And look good doing it. 

Flashback: "Citizen Kane"

   The first time I saw "Citizen Kane" was in the early 1960s in the high school gym. It must've been a 16mm print and I'm sure the sound wasn't very good and I was tired and kind of bored. I think I fell asleep. 
    I saw it a few more times in the years that followed. For a young, evolving cinemaphile, it was inevitable. I don't remember catching it on television back then, but I might have, and there would be an occasional screening at one of the campus film societies in Madison. I took an introductory film course my senior year in college, and I'm pretty sure I saw it there. I didn't fall asleep, but it didn't do anything special for me, either, at least not the way that "M*A*S*H" and "Easy Rider" and "The Wild Bunch" did. 
    Then a funny thing happened. It was 1985 and I was staying with some friends in New York City. It was late at night and everybody else had gone to bed and I was in the living room, where I was camping out on the couch, watching television. I caught part of a West Coast baseball game (Don Sutton pitching for the Athletics), and during a commercial break I was flipping through the channels, and suddenly there in luminous black and white were those heavy iron bars and the distant, mist-shrouded specter of Xanadu: the opening shots of "Citizen Kane". 
    So I watched it again, and I wasn't as tired this time as I had been in high school, and I wasn't really working at watching it, I was just watching it, and for the first time it struck me: This movie is fun. I think for a lot of people, that's what goes missing when they watch "Citizen Kane" - the brazen, impish, kid-in-a-candy-store joy and energy that went into making it. 
    Orson Welles was in his mid-20s when he directed "Kane". He'd already stunned the theater world with his voodoo "Macbeth" and the radio universe with "War of the Worlds", and the studio, RKO, famously gave him a blank check to make whatever movie he wanted to, so he did. He took on the life of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, twisted it to his own specifications, kicked it around for a couple of hours, and had a ball. Hearst, crucially, was very much alive at that point, and did everything in his power to have the film destroyed. He failed, but the movie haunted both men forever. (See the 1996 documentary "The Battle Over Citizen Kane".)
    Part of the deal with "Citizen Kane" is that it comes at you with all this ponderous baggage, a reputation as a groundbreaking masterpiece (which it was) and (subject to debate) the greatest motion picture ever made. More than any other American movie, it's one you're supposed to take seriously.
    But here's the thing. It's also a movie intended to entertain: a precocious, self-indulgent extravaganza, an epic, a film noir, a comedy, a creative goof and a deviously fictionalized biopic. It's Orson Welles playing with what he himself called the world's biggest train set. It's a work of genius, sure, but try not to take it too seriously. Imagine it's just a movie, and assuming you're not too tired while you're watching it, you might even find it's, you know, fun.