Six and a Half (2009)

SIX AND A HALF  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ana Lily Amirpour
    Harley Graham, Michael Gallagher
A girl comes across a frog in a pond and wades out into the water where she cuts her foot on a piece of broken glass. A doctor sews up her foot, and then later on, the girl does something to a frog she's kept in a box. It's not clear whether it's the same frog, or if the frog in the pond got away when the girl cut her foot on the glass. Things do not end well for the frog in the box, but the credits claim that no frogs were harmed during the making of this motion picture, and I hope that's the case. 

Terror From the Year 5000 (1958)

TERROR FROM THE YEAR 5000  (1958)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert J. Gurney Jr.
    Ward Costello, Joyce Holden, Frederic Downs,
    John Stratton, Salome Jens, Fred Herrick
Scientists tinkering with a time machine make contact with humans 3,000 years in the future, and if you think life will be better then than it is now, guess again. When a woman from the future slips back into the 20th century, she's a mutant, a scarred figure in a spangled catsuit. It's a horror cheapie with a message: If we want to prevent bad shit from happening to our distant descendants, we'd better get our act together in the present. A quick glance at the present would suggest that the odds of us doing that are not too good. Also, you don't want to mess with a scarred woman in a spangled catsuit. 

The Snow Walker (2003)

THE SNOW WALKER  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Martin Smith
    Barry Pepper, Annabella Piugattuk, James Cromwell, 
    Kiersten Warren, Jon Gries, Robin Dunne
An under-the-radar survival adventure about a bush pilot and an Inuit woman who come to rely on each other in ways they could not have expected when their plane goes down somewhere in Canada's vast Northwest Territories. At first, their key to life or death appears to be with the pilot. He has a rifle, after all. But it's the woman who  understands the environment they're in, who can catch a fish, snare a groundhog, start a fire without matches and skin a caribou. Handy things to know when you're lost and off-course with limited supplies and no working radio, hundreds of miles from nowhere and winter's closing in. What distinguishes this are the performances of Barry Pepper and Annabella Puigattuk as two characters who appear to have nothing in common, including a language, and find a way to transcend that, through necessity and a sense of shared humanity. They're not a couple in any romantic sense - to its credit, the movie doesn't go there - but they're an effective odd-couple team, the chemistry between them both grudgingly earned and discreetly expressed. 

Staircase (1969)

STAIRCASE  (1969)  ¢ ¢
    D: Stanley Donen
    Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Cathleen Nesbitt
Rex and Dick play middle-aged queens whose 30-year relationship has settled into a contentious but mutually supportive bitchfest. Really, darling.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

TONI ERDMANN  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Maren Ade
    Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek, Michael Wittenborn,
    Thomas Loibl, Trystan Pütter, Ingrid Bisu, Jürg Löw
An Oscar-nominated German comedy about an eccentric schoolteacher, a guy in his 60s, it looks like, who takes a month off and travels to Bucharest, where his daughter has a job with a consulting firm. The daughter is stern, serious, sober and stressed. The father is anything but. He's a clown, a joker, a madman, complete with a ratty-looking wig and false teeth. She's trying to orchestrate a high-end deal with a Romanian oil company, and he's not just getting in the way, he's messing things up. She's keeping it under control, but he's driving her crazy. The movie's about the two of them, and the balance is what makes it interesting. The old man, played by Peter Simonischek (and Jack Nicholson in the upcoming remake), is constantly performing, playing games, acting out in socially questionable ways, and making up preposterous stories just to see how far he can go with them. "Toni Erdmann" is his alter ego, a transparently fake life coach. At one point, he even tries to pass himself off as the German ambassador to Romania. But as the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the key character isn't the nutjob dad but the no-nonsense daughter (Sandra Hüller), who wears tension like a suit of clothes that's a little too tight, a metaphor that becomes literal late in the film, when her stoic resistance starts to crumble. The scene is a birthday party she's compulsively prepared. All through the movie, you've been watching her, wondering  when and how she's going to crack. When it happens, she doesn't scream or explode. She simply lets go, staying in character while doing something you'd never expect her character to do, and you know that somewhere within her, a seismic shift has occurred. It's a revealing moment in more ways than one. 

Kentaro Moto's Hangover Cure

From "Think Fast, Mr. Moto" (1937)

In a tall glass, mix

a measure of lemon juice

a pinch of salt

one egg

four dashes of orange bitters

one jigger of Worcestershire sauce

two teaspoons of sugar

a shot of absinthe

Fill to the top with gin, stir vigorously, and drink.

This will either make your day look a lot better,

or you won't be around to know the difference.

Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)

THINK FAST, MR. MOTO  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Norman Foster
    Peter Lorre, Virginia Field, Sig Rumann,
    Murray Kinnell, Lotus Long, J. Carrol Naish
A soft-spoken Japanese detective sails to Shanghai to investigate a smuggling ring in a movie released the same year the real Japanese went nuts in Nanking. Bad timing, Mr. Moto.

Battle of the Sexes (2017)

BATTLE OF THE SEXES  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
    Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough,
    Sarah Silverman, Elisabeth Shue, Natalie Morales,
    Jessica McNamee, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming,
    Fred Armison, Austin Stowell, Jamey Sheridan 
The most wildly hyped tennis match in history took place in the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, between the fiercely competitive women's champion Billie Jean King and a grandstanding hustler (and long-ago men's champion), Bobby Riggs. King was 29 at the time. Riggs was 55. The match was to some extent a circus - Riggs' participation guaranteed that - but it was also a high-stakes gamble for King, who hadn't just staked her own reputation on the outcome, but the integrity of the newly formed Women's Tennis Association and at least symbolically the women's movement as a whole. I'm not sure I would've picked Emma Stone to play King till I saw this. After watching it, I'm not sure I'd want anybody else. She finds a vulnerability in King that King herself, publicly at least, never let anybody see. Steve Carell is more one-dimensional as Riggs, a crass con artist and tireless show-off with a serious gambling addiction, but that's more a reflection on Riggs than Carell, and physically Carell is practically a clone of the guy. King's sexual orientation figures into the story - she was married at the time and embarking on a relationship with another woman - as does her role in the founding of the WTA. But the main event is the match with Riggs, complete with an archived Howard Cosell and a television audience of 90 million, most of them rooting for Billie Jean. For what she did, when she did it, for her tenacity on the court and her grace in the glare of the spotlight, King was one of the more heroic sports figures of the 20th century. Sometimes greatness comes in glasses and a tennis dress.