Year By the Sea (2016)

YEAR BY THE SEA  (2016)  ¢ ¢
    D: Alexander Janko
    Karen Allen, Celia Imrie, Michael Cristofer,
    S. Epatha Merkerson, Yannick Bisson, Jane Hajduk
A woman whose marriage has  gone dead rents a house on an island off Cape Cod and moves there, hoping to find herself. Or something. The woman is played by Karen Allen, which is a good enough reason to watch  this movie, for some of us, anyway. But it's all a bit precious, with enough New Age abstraction to sink a small boat, which turns out to be the woman's main means of transportation. So she's isolated (on an island) and at sea (in a boat), exploring a feminist universe in which women are invariably sensitive and enlightened, while men who aren't downright abusive tend to be closed-off or senile, or (at best) disposable. Allen's clearly not afraid to look and act her age, letting the years and miles speak for themselves, and not doing much of anything to conceal the evidence. It's part of what makes her an interesting actress. It's just too bad she couldn't be out there rowing her boat in a more interesting movie.

Villain (1971)

VILLAIN  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Tuchner
    Richard Burton, Ian McShane, Nigel Davenport,
    Joss Ackland, Fiona Lewis, Cathleen Nesbitt
A surprisingly vicious crime drama starring Richard Burton as a gangster who engineers a payroll heist. A cold, twisted piece of work and a definite prototype for Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino. Burton's performance is nasty.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg
    Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Javier Bardem,
    Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Golshifteh Farahani,
    Kevin McNally, David Denham, Paul McCartney
That's "Pirates 5", for those who keep track of such things, with Johnny Depp staggering back on board as flamboyant rumpot Captain Jack Sparrow. This time around, Captain Jack and everybody else in the pirate universe is sailing out after the Trident of Poseidon, a fabled treasure that has the power to reverse all the curses of the sea. So there's Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), of course. And a ghost ship commanded by ruthless (and dead) pirate killer Javier Bardem. And another ship manned by pirate-hunting redcoats. And a young romantic couple, both linked genetically to older "Pirates" characters. And Captain Jack's sometimes mutinous crew. And a monkey. It'd be a mistake to expect too much from a movie like this, but on its own terms, it delivers the ill-gotten goods. It's too long by at least a couple of reels, and Geoff Zanelli's musical score never stops reminding you that he's listened to a lot of Hans Zimmer. But it's also lively, exciting, broadly acted, cool to look at and shamelessly silly. I saw it at the Crest in Seattle on a Wednesday afternoon when the temperature outside was over 90°, and for $4, it was just the thing.

Panic In the Year Zero! (1962)

PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO!  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ray Milland
    Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon,
    Mary Mitchel, Joan Freeman, Richard Garland
Ray Milland and the the wife and kids are motoring off on a camping vacation, when, wouldn't you know it, Los Angeles gets vaporized in the rear-view mirror. Their first thought is to turn around and drive right back toward the mushroom cloud to see how grandma's making out, but then they decide it might be smarter to pick up some groceries and guns and gasoline and head for the mountains instead, so that's what they do. How long would it take for civilization to break down in the wake of a catastrophic event? Not long at all, according to this movie, when moral behavior has no value, rational thinking is in short supply, and violence and paranoia rule the land the way Les Baxter's jazz score rules the soundtrack. It's every man for himself out there, and worst of all, the price of gas just went up from 30¢ a gallon to $3, which is a lot more than Ray Milland wants to pay, and he's  got a rifle and a .45. Might as well head for the hills, I guess. We're doomed.

Novitiate (2017)

NOVITIATE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Margaret Betts
    Margaret Qualley, Melissa Leo, Julianne Nicholson,
    Dianna Agron, Liana Liberato, Eline Powell,
    Maddie Hasson, Denis O'Hare, Rebecca Dayan
Change never comes easy in the Catholic Church, and the new rules brought about by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s were especially difficult for the traditionalists who wanted everything to stay medieval. This movie follows a group of novice nuns through their first two years in the convent, just as the new guidelines are going into effect. Resisting the changes tooth and nail is the Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo), who believes the Church and its inflexible rules are perfect just the way they are. She demands perfection of the young sisters, too, and her methods for achieving that can best be described as psychological torture. Whether the movie gets everything right is something I wouldn't know. I always figured the expression "bride of Christ" was metaphorical, but the approach to it here is literal. The girls wear wedding gowns when they take their sacred vows, and afterward go outside to dance around a fire, an ecstatic rite that looks distinctly pagan. But if that scene and others were enhanced for dramatic effect, a lot of what happens in "Novitiate" seems pretty accurate, and Leo's tyrannical Reverend Mother is just the kind of old-school nun who would've scared the crap out of us back at St. Bernard's.

Suspense (1913)

SUSPENSE  (1913)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Phillips Smalle, Lois Weber
    Lois Weber, Val Paul, Douglas Gerard, Sam Kaufman
An early silent thriller in which a man races home in a stolen car to save his wife from a knife-wielding intruder. There's some real nice camerawork - check out the mirror images - and an effective use of split screens to tell the story.

RBG (2018)

RBG  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Julie Cohen, Betsy West
RBG, sometimes affectionately referred to as "Notorious RBG," would be Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the diminutive force of nature who for the last 25 years has delivered articulate opinions and pointed dissents from the bench of the United States Supreme Court. At 84, she still works out in the gym, still puts in marathon hours poring over cases and briefs, still speaks out forcefully on issues affecting those who would otherwise be marginalized under the law. You even see her onstage in a non-singing part in an opera, delivering a humorous edict she wrote herself. She's a character, for sure, an inspiration, a remarkable woman, and a voice of reason and empathy on an increasingly conservative court. She plans to serve as long as she can do the job, and you can't help hoping that's a long time yet, or - considering who's making judicial appointments these days - at least another two or three years.

Marianne (1929)

MARIANNE  (1929)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Z. Leonard
    Marion Davies, George Baxter, Lawrence Gray,
    Cliff Edwards, Benny Rubin, Scott Kolk
Marion Davies' first sound film, a musical with Davies cast s a French maid trying to fend off a bunch of obnoxious doughboys and grudgingly falling for one of them. The story's an awkward mixture of comedy and melodrama, and Marion wrestles a French accent to the ground and practically beats it to death. Sometimes you can even decipher what she's saying. The funniest scene has Davies in drag as a young French army officer, and her Maurice Chevalier impression is a highlight. 

The Shape of Water (2017)

THE SHAPE OF WATER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Guillermo del Toro
    Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer,
    Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones
This is where "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" meets "Beauty and the Beast". Or maybe "Cinderella and the Beast" would be more like it. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, the Cinderella character, a mute janitor working in some sort of top-secret government research facility. Doug Jones plays the Beast, an amphibious, humanoid creature with fins and scales, caught and brought back from the Amazon and referred to by his captors as "the asset." The space race is on and the Soviets are interested in the creature, too. Meanwhile, the janitor develops an attachment to the creature, thanks to music, an open heart and a few dozen hard-boiled eggs. The story's set in the era of "Mr. Ed" and "Dobie Gillis", and the set design has the kind of decaying, steampunk look about it that you get in the films of Jeunet and Caro. It's not hard to know who to root for or against. Michael Shannon's security nazi, a pill-popping psycho armed with a surly demeanor and a cattle prod, couldn't be much more one-dimensional. But at its core, it's a fairy-tale love story, a sweet, wistful fantasy romance, and if Hawkins and Jones don't make you believe their unlikely coupling, they'll at least make you wish you could. It's also, at least incidentally, a movie lover's celebration of film. Elisa's apartment is directly above a cinema, where "The Story of Ruth" is playing on a double bill with Pat Boone in "Mardi Gras". And if you look closely, you can see film canisters lining the hallway outside her door. The television in the apartment across the hall is constantly tuned to 1940s musicals, and in what amounts to a fantasy within a fantasy, Elisa and the creature dance their way through their own black-and-white production number, a sequence that's transporting, partly because it's a rapturous piece of filmmaking, and partly because it's such a breathtaking risk. A final note (and this won't mean much unless you see the movie): Go ahead and try the hard-boiled eggs. Just steer clear of the key-lime pie.

Bio Picks/Take 2

Here's some biopic casting I'd like to see:

                    Jeremy Irons as Boris Karloff

                    Rooney Mara as Audrey Hepburn

                    Vincent Gallo as Edgar Allan Poe

                    Emma Stone as Bette Davis

                    Charlotte Gainsbourg as Patti Smith

                    Siaorse Ronan as Jane Goodall

                    Stephen Colbert as Harold Lloyd

                    Matt Damon as Al Franken

                    Liam Neeson as Gary Cooper

                    Ben Whishaw as George Orwell
                    Johnny Depp as Salvador Dali

                    Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis

                    Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

SHADOW OF A DOUBT  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alfred Hitchcock
    Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, MacDonald Carey,
    Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn
Good old Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) returns home after a long time away, with a jocular air, a bunch of good stories, and $40,000 in cash he'd like to deposit in his brother-in-law's bank. There's something suspicious about Uncle Charlie that the movie has hinted at, but it takes his niece (Teresa Wright) a while to figure it out. It's one of Hitchcock's most unsettling movies, and one of Cotten's most memorable roles. The credited screenwriters include Thornton Wilder and Hitchcock's wife Alma. Uncredited ones include Hitchcock himself, and the exchanges between Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn about the different ways they might murder each other are almost certainly the director's work. 

Victoria & Abdul (2017)

VICTORIA & ABDUL  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Stephen Frears
    Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Tim Pigott-Smith,
    Eddie Izzard, Adeel Akhtar, Michael Gambon,
    Olivia Williams, Fenella Woolgar, Paul Higgins,
    Robin Soans, Julian Wadham, Simon Callow
I caught this at the Crest with Ms. Applebaum, who thought it was more of a drama, while I thought it was more of a comedy. (As one of the few people on the planet who thought "Blue Jasmine" was a comedy, I'm aware that my judgment in this area might not be the best.) It's late in the long life and reign of Queen Victoria, when her majesty strikes up an unlikely  relationship with an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim, who becomes her teacher, confidant, and evidently her only real friend. This horrifies practically everybody in the palace, from the servants to the prime minister, but there's not much they can do about it, except exchange pained looks as they wait for Victoria to croak, and she's taking her time doing that. Judi Dench, who played Victoria before in "Mrs. Brown" (1997), takes no prisoners as the bossy, cantankerous queen. Ali Fazal is the devoted Abdul, her "munshi". A lot of it plays like "Harold and Maude" at the royal court, and Frears gets a lot of mileage out of the odd-couple chemistry Dench and Fazal bring to their work together. There's an underlying seriousness about it, too, and most of the queen's retainers treat Abdul with undisguised contempt, but I guess I'd still say it comes off as more of a comedy. Just remember, I thought that about "Blue Jasmine", too.

Teddy At the Throttle (1917)

TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE  (1917)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Clarence E. Badger
    Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Bobby Vernon,
    May Emory, Blanche Phillips, Charles Bennett
Wallace Berry chains Gloria Swanson to a railroad track, with a speeding locomotive barreling toward her. Can Gloria's faithful dog Teddy get there in time to save her? It could go either way, I suppose, but in a Keystone two-reeler from 1917, I'd put my money on the dog.