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.