Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Olivier Assayas
    Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz,
    Lars Eidinger, Angela Winkler, Johnny Flynn
Parallel characters in parallel relationships get all tangled up in an ambitious, ambiguous psychological study starring Juliette Binoche as a middle-aged actress and Kristen Stewart as her assistant. Maria Enders (Binoche) once played the younger role in a play about two women. Now, in a revival, she's playing the older one. The director tells her the key to the piece is that the two characters are the same woman. So you've got the relationship between the two women in the play. And the parallel relationship between Maria and Stewart's character, an efficient, brutally insightful 20-something named Valentine. The relationship between Maria and Chloë Grace Moretz  as the headline-grabbing younger actress in the revival. A case of off-stage suicide that haunts both productions. And the fact that Maria now identifies with both characters in the play. A lot of this was shot in the Swiss Alps, and a lot of it involves Valentine helping Maria run her lines, the lines in the play and the words they exchange outside of it running together to become indistinguishable. There's a little bit of Bergman in this, a puzzle to wrap your head around, and a supportive and sometimes testy workout for Stewart and Binoche. 

Coquette (1929)

COQUETTE  (1929)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Taylor
    Mary Pickford, John Mack Brown, Matt Moore,
    John St. Polis, George Irving, Louise Beavers
Silent superstar Mary Pickford won an Oscar for this early talkie, playing a Southern belle who falls hard for a handsome young man from the wrong side of town. It's a movie with one foot in the silent era and the other in sound, and Pickford's performance reflects that. With her hair cut fashionably short, Mary's undeniably cute, but the dialogue's stiff and the sound quality's terrible. Pickford made only three more movies after this, and effectively retired in 1933.

Wonder Woman (2017)

WONDER WOMAN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Patty Jenkins
    Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright,
    Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Said Taghmaoui,
    Ewen Bremner, Eugene Brave Rock, Elena Anaya
The origin story of Wonder Woman is a revisionist fantasy in which the Amazon Princess Diana sails away from Paradise Island with an American aviator named Steve Trevor, who takes her to London and introduces her to life in the early 20th century. (Keeping her Amazon body more or less covered up is one of the things she has to get used to.) Then she's off to the front, to kill a lot of Germans, battle the god Ares, and save the world by winning World War One. What sets this apart from most other superhero movies isn't just that its ass-kicking lead character is female, but that it plays out in such a specific historical context. The action scenes are decently executed, and Gal Gadot flying through the air in slow motion with her sword and shield looks authentically heroic. Chris Pine plays Steve Trevor with the same cocky self-assurance he brought to Captain Kirk, and even gets to zoom around on a motorcycle, just like he did in "Star Trek Beyond". Robin Wright, looking lean and tough, plays Antiope, Wonder Woman's Amazon aunt, who teaches her how to be a warrior back on the island. Too bad we can't come up with a superhero like this every time there's a horrible war to be fought. It'd make things so much easier. 

The Pink Panther (1963)

THE PINK PANTHER  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Blake Edwards
    David Niven, Peter Sellers, Claudia Cardinale,
    Robert Wagner, Capucine, Fran Jeffries

The Pink Panther is

a) a stylish Blake Edwards comedy about a master jewel thief plotting to steal the world's most valuable diamond. 
b) the name of the diamond.
c) a series of films, starting with this one, starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling police inspector Jacques Clouseau.
d) a cartoon cat making its first appearance in the title sequence of this movie.
e) Henry Mancini's most widely recognized title theme, also making its screen debut.
f) a series of DePatie/Freleng animated shorts featuring the previously mentioned cartoon cat. 
g) all of the above.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

KONG: SKULL ISLAND  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
    Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson,
    John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Corey Hawkins,
    John Ortiz, Tian Jing, Toby Kebbel, Shea Whigham
Big monkey. Scary monsters. Whiz-bang effects. Crazy John C. Reilly. Nutso Samuel L. Jackson. Tom Hiddleston with biceps. Brie Larson in a tank top. Lots of stuff lifted straight from "Apocalypse Now". What's not to like? Well, um, the script . . .

The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926)

THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH 
    D: Henry King                     (1926)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky, Gary Cooper,
    Charles Lane, Paul McAllister, Clyde Cook
A western from the late silent era in which Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper compete for the hand of Vilma Banky, while engineers and homesteaders try to corral the Colorado River to irrigate the desert. Some major plot points are resolved a little too easily in this, but the scale is epic, the cinematography is eye-catching, and the climactic flood, even done with miniatures, is spectacular. It was Cooper's first starring role, and while he doesn't seem to do much, he always seems to look good doing it. 

Wonderstruck (2017)

WONDERSTRUCK  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Todd Haynes
    Millicent Simmonds, Oakes Fegley, Julianne Moore,
    Michelle Williams, James Urbaniak, Tom Noonan
Two interconnected period pieces, both revolving around an 11-year-old kid who's deaf. In 1927, a girl named Rose slips away from her home in New Jersey and catches the ferry to New York to look for her mother. That episode is mostly silent and in black and white. Fifty years later, a boy named Ben escapes from a hospital in Minnesota and catches a bus to New York to look for his dad. There's talking in that one, and it's in color. Both kids end up at the Museum of Natural History, and eventually a book store, where their lives intersect. The script is by Brian Selznick, who wrote "Hugo", and has a real knack for juvenile adventures that could appeal to grownups as much as to kids. And he definitely has a thing for books, old movies and in this story specifically, museums. Oakes Fegley, as Ben, looks enough like Michelle Williams, playing his mother, for their relationship to be believable. But the real discovery is deaf actress Millicent Simmonds as Rose. She's a natural, an actress who appears to take everything in without changing her expression much at all. You can imagine her showing up at an open audition and getting the part, not because she's the cutest girl in the room, but because she's the most interesting. Julianne Moore looks right at home in a film within the film, as the star of a silent movie, and Carter Burwell's score weaves in and out on the soundtrack, along with period tunes from the two time frames. Don't be surprised if you walk out of this with David Bowie's "Space Oddity" stuck in your head.

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Huston
    Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner,
    Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Cyril Delevanti,
    Skip Ward, Mary Boylan, Emilio Fernandez
Misery loves company and gets it in John Huston's screen version of the Tennessee Williams play. Richard Burton's an alcoholic clergyman, on the skids in Mexico, where he leads chattering gringo women on bus tours of religious shrines. Deborah Kerr's an itinerant sketch artist without a peso to her name. Ava Gardner plays an ex-pat innkeeper with an eye for shirtless Mexican boys. Sue Lyon plays (what else?) Lolita. They all go at it tooth and nail, but maybe they could stand to dial it back a bit. Gardner's the scene stealer. Burton looks like he got into character by drinking a lot, and he probably did. 

Character Study: John Carradine

                  "Directors never direct me.
                    They just turn me loose."
                     John Carradine

    I suppose if you were going to embark on a study of Hollywood character actors, a natural first question would be: Where do you start? Here's an idea: John Carradine. For the sheer volume of movies he appeared in, Carradine might be the most prolific actor in the history of film. The exact number of titles is unknown and unknowable, but estimates range up to over 500. 
    Starting at the dawn of sound, Carradine appeared in pretty much everything - classics and crap, epics, westerns, swashbucklers, comedies, sci-fi, horror and high drama. He played leads in some B movies, but did most of his best work in support. He worked for John Ford a lot, and logged time with directors as varied as Martin Scorsese, Fritz Lang, Woody Allen and Cecil B. DeMille. He also appeared in some of the worst movies ever made, pictures where the title tells you everything you need to know: "Satan's Cheerleaders", "The House of the Seven Corpses", "Vampire Hookers", "Hell's Bloody Devils" and "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula". 
    He was tall and gaunt, with a famously bony face and a great booming voice that he sometimes put to use reciting Shakespeare on the streets of Hollywood. Carradine claimed he actually delivered those soliloquies at night in the Hollywood Bowl, but the legend persists, circumstantial evidence suggesting that he wasn't just a character actor, he was a character. 
    Another story goes that as a contract player at Fox back in the 1930s, Carradine had a bicycle on the studio lot and would pedal from one set to another, get in costume, play a scene, and be off to the next set, working on several films in a single day. Sometimes his name would appear in the credits and sometimes not. Maybe that's how you end up making 500 movies. 
    He turns up uncredited as one of the hunters who appear at the blind man's cottage in "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), and had significant roles as Long Jack in "Captains Courageous" (1937) and the preacher Casy in "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940). As Katharine Hepburn's loyal retainer in "Mary of Scotland" (1937), he even got to sing. He was the gambler in "Stagecoach", Bret Harte in "The Adventures of Mark Twain", a serial murderer in "Bluebeard", Count Dracula in a couple of films, Aaron in "The Ten Commandments", the undertaker in "The Shootist" and the surgeon who turns Rex Reed into Raquel Welch in "Myra Breckinridge". He played priests and wizards and bums, Scrooge and Frankenstein and Abraham Lincoln and Fu Manchu. He never stopped working - his filmography testifies to that - and he was still at it when he died at 82 in 1988.
    He could chew the sound stage with the best of them, but a lot of the movies he did that in were lost causes anyway, and he was often the only thing that made them worth watching. He could be understated, too, when he got a part and a movie that called for that. When he let it rip, he was fun. When he scaled it back, he was better. Either way, he seemed to know instinctively what a picture was worth and what he could get away with, and would calibrate his performance accordingly. One thing you could count on: You always got your money's worth from John Carradine.

The Vietnam War (2017)

THE VIETNAM WAR  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
Of all the fucked-up wars in human history - and that would be all of them - a likely candidate for the most fucked-up would be Vietnam. Whatever justifications or noble intentions might've gone into it, the execution on all sides was an atrocity. It was like this long-running, real-life horror show that came to you nightly on the network news. For years. And that was if you were lucky enough not to be over there fighting the war yourself. Here Vietnam gets the Ken Burns treatment - 18 hours worth - and if that sounds like a long haul, it's not nearly as long as a year in the jungle. Like its subject, the movie is ragged, messy, maddening, heroic, gruesome, contradictory and horrifying. Veterans, peace activists, draft dodgers, family members and Vietnamese - North, South, Viet Cong and civilians - all weigh in on what happened back then and what they think about it now. Their testimony is candid and gut-wrenching. You'd like to think we've learned something since then. Don't bet on it.

Surf Party (1964)

SURF PARTY  (1964)  ¢ ¢
    D: Maury Dexter
    Bobby Vinton, Patricia Morrow, Jackie DeShannon,
    Kenny Miller, Lory Patrick, Richard Crane, 
    Jerry Summers, Martha Stewart, Lloyd Kino
Three girls from Arizona take off for the coast, where they hope to learn how to surf. Bobby Vinton runs a surf shop and offers to teach them. The girls all fall for surfer dudes and there's a lot of music and dancing. One of the surfer dudes has to leave town when his careless lifestyle catches up to him, and another ends up in the hospital when he wipes out trying to "run the pier." At the end it looks like the girls are heading back to Arizona. Bobby Vinton does not sing "Blue Velvet". 

Nine Lives (2005)

NINE LIVES  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Rodrigo García
    Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn, Holly Hunter,
    Elpidia Carillo, Glenn Close, LisaGay Hamilton,
    Aidan Quinn, Ian McShane, Molly Parker,
    Jason Isaacs, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Brenneman, 
    Kathy Baker, Joe Mantegna, Sydney Tamiia Poitier,
    Dakota Fanning, Mary Kay Place, William Fichtner
Nine women. Nine stories. Nine short films, some tangentially connected, each shot on film in a single take, none more than 14 minutes long. Most revolve around awkward conversations, and most of them are painful. The locations are varied: a prison, a hospital, a funeral home, a supermarket. The last segment, starring Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning and set in a graveyard, is heartbreaking.

North By Northwest (1959)

NORTH BY NORTHWEST  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alfred Hitchcock
    Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason,
    Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau, Jessie Royce Landis,
    Adam Williams, Robert Ellenstein, Edward Platt
The wrong man (Cary Grant). The chilly blonde (Eva Marie Saint). The urbane villain (James Mason). The sinister henchman ( Martin Landau). The MacGuffin (which doesn't appear till the last ten minutes). The tightly wound set pieces (the drunk-driving scene, the crop-duster scene, the art-auction scene, the climax on top of Mount Rushmore). Bernard Herrmann's music. And Leo G. Carroll. Just about everything you'd want or expect in a Hitchcock movie turns up in this somewhere. Classic escapist suspense from the director's peak period. One of them, anyway.