Bill Frisell: A Portrait (2017)

BILL FRISELL: A PORTRAIT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Emma Franz
Early on in this documentary, a fellow musician expresses the opinion that there simply isn't anybody who doesn't love Bill Frisell. After spending a couple of hours hanging out with Frisell and listening to him play, you'll know why that's true. He's the most unassuming guy you'd ever want to meet. Talking about his music, he's barely articulate. Playing it, he's the best there is. The film is practically wall-to-wall music: Frisell playing with various combinations of musicians in just about every genre imaginable. He's as prolific as he is versatile (he's played on virtually hundreds of albums), and the more you listen, the more you wonder if he's ever played a note on any of his many guitars that didn't sound good. Even his goofs sound good. If you're a fan, you won't want to miss this. If you're not, the movie could make you one.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

FRIENDLY PERSUASION  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: William Wyler
    Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins,
    Marjorie Main, Robert Middleton, Phyllis Love,
    Mark Richman, Walter Catlett, John Smith
A Quaker family in southern Indiana has to decide whether to take up arms in the Civil War. Homespun Americana in widescreen and color by De Luxe, idealized to the point where you wonder when the Rogers-and-Hammerstein songs are going to kick in. Cooper's the patriarch. McGuire's his wife and the movie's rock-ribbed pacifist conscience. Perkins plays their oldest son, and a pivotal supporting role is played by a goose. A great many "thee"s punctuate the script. Michael Wilson, who wrote it from Jessamyn West's novel, got an Oscar nomination, but no screen credit because of the blacklist.

Loving Vincent (2017)

LOVING VINCENT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dorota Korbiela, Hugh Welchman
    Douglas Booth, Chris O'Dowd, Eleanor Tomlinson,
    Aidan Turner, Saoirse Ronan, Jerome Flynn,
    Robert Gulaczyk, Robin Hodges, John Sessions
An animated mystery about a postmaster's son dispatched to deliver Vincent Van Gogh's last letter to his brother Theo, sometime after Vincent's death. Finding that Theo himself has died, the messenger ends up hanging around Auvers, talking to those who knew Vincent - all of them subjects in his paintings - and trying to piece together what happened in the last few weeks of the artist's life. What's revealed is a maze of conflicting stories, like "Rashomon" in oil on canvas, and visually that's exactly what the movie achieves. It was shot using real actors and then painted frame by frame in the style of Van Gogh. That required the work of more than 100 artists, making it the most labor-intensive case of rotoscoping ever, and the most literal example yet of images in paint coming to life. It's a magnificent eyeshow, especially on a big screen. Crows and wheat fields and sunflowers never looked so good.

Two Way Stretch (1960)

TWO WAY STRETCH  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Day
    Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Lionel Jeffries,
    Liz Fraser, Maurice Denham, Bernard Cribbens
Three cons closing in on their release dates sign on for a diamond heist for which they'll have the perfect alibi: They'll escape, pull off the job, and sneak back into prison before anybody knows they were gone. A pleasantly barmy British comedy in the combined spirit of Ealing, the "Carry On" films and Monty Python. Authority figures are more or less doomed in a movie like this. The more seriously they take themselves, the worse it's going to be for them. Lionel Jeffries, as a tyrannical prison guard, doesn't stand a chance.

Quote File/Take 12

Some lines from the screenplays of William Goldman:

"The future's all yours, ya lousy bicycles!"
  Paul Newman 
  in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

"I thought everyone knew that God was a 
  Scotsman."
  Sean Connery
  in "A Bridge Too Far"

"What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."
  Cary Elwes
  in "The Princess Bride"

"Do you want my signed confession now, 
  or after coffee?"
  Clint Eastwood to Ed Harris
  in "Absolute Power"

"Nothing much surprises me anymore, except 
  what people do to each other."
  Burt Reynolds
  in "Heat"

"If you want to understand me, watch my movies."
  Robert Downey Jr.
  in "Chaplin"

William Goldman

(1931-2018)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Luc Besson
    Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna,
    Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer
"Star Wars" meets "Avatar", more or less, in a sci-fi adventure about a couple of young space commandos whose mission is to, well, it's not entirely clear what their mission is, except to get into one scrape after another and look good doing it. So there are these creatures that look like an overfed Jar Jar Binks, and an even more grossly obese thing that could be the brother of Jabba the Hutt, and a race of skinny, peaceful, supersmart aliens, and a commander (called "The Commander") played by Clive Owen, who blew the aliens' planet to smithereens a while back, and now wants to kill the remaining aliens, who just want their planet back. Oh, and there's this little iguana-like creature that shits pearls, which comes in handy if, you know, you're running low on pearls. The visuals are cool. The storytelling's juvenile. The leads are attractive but bland. Rihanna does an eye-catching number as a shape-shifting pole dancer in a scene that makes you wonder whether maybe Besson didn't wish he was working with an R rating instead of a PG-13. Ethan Hawke appears briefly as Rihanna's pimp and gives the movie's most enjoyably crazed performance. 

Brief Moment (1933)

BRIEF MOMENT  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Burton
    Carole Lombard, Gene Raymond, Monroe Owsley,
    Donald Cook, Reginald Mason, Irene Ware
A nightclub singer marries a playboy, but his no-work-and-all-party lifestyle has an adverse effect on their relationship. There's a guy who runs a speakeasy who's crazy about her, but she's in love with the playboy, which is too bad, because she'd be better off with the speakeasy guy. Some women just fall for the wrong men, you know?

A Private War (2018)

A PRIVATE WAR  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Matthew Heineman
    Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander,
    Stanley Tucci, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Corey Johnson
A fragmented, hair-raising look at the work of war correspondents, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin, a reporter for Britain's Sunday Times, who covered every dangerous hot spot she could get to from 1986 till her death in 2012. Armed with a notebook and a Bic pen, a laptop  she's at odds with and plenty of cigarettes, Colvin turns up in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, dodging bullets and rocket fire every step of the way. It takes a toll. She loses an eye in a firefight (but looks great in an eyepatch), suffers from PTSD, and has a serious drinking problem. She's what used to be known as "a tough broad," but her gruff manner only partly masks the compassion that drives her work. She admits she hates being in war zones, but she keeps going back to them, specifically to the places where civilians are being targeted and slaughtered. "I want to tell the world your story," is her standard introduction to the broken, lost souls she writes about, and she does that, till an artillery round in Syria brings her life to a violent close. At a time when the bully in the White House routinely trashes journalists enemies of the people, it's good to be reminded (again) that the best of them are anything but. 

Taxi! (1932)

TAXI!  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roy Del Ruth
    James Cagney, Loretta Young, George E. Stone,
    Dorothy Burgess, Leila Bennett, Guy Kibbee 
Cagney plays a hot-headed cab driver who tangles with a syndicate out to run the independent taxis off the streets. Loretta Young plays his girl, who'd like him to be less impulsively violent. Cagney's performance is as physical as it is verbal. Acting as choreography. 

The Grandad (2014)

THE GRANDAD  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bjarni Thorsson
    Sigurdur Sigurjónsson, Sigrún Edda Björnsdóttir,
    Steinbór Hróar Steinbórsson, Tinna Sverrisdóttir
An Icelandic comedy about a civil engineer whose spiral into a late midlife crisis begins when his boss tells him he's being downsized to half-time. Besides which, he has prostate issues, his marriage has grown stale, his pregnant daughter's getting married to a guy he can't stand, and his golf game could use a little help. If a vehicle passes by in the background, more than likely it's a hearse. Sometimes this is deadpan funny. Sometimes it takes a silly joke and stretches it a little too thin. Sigurdur Sigurjónsson plays it all with a straight-faced fatalism that both expects very little and still somehow hopes for the best. Mostly it's a movie about waiting, not that everything comes to those who wait, but that something's got to, eventually.

The Immigrant (1917)

THE IMMIGRANT  (1917)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Charles Chaplin
    Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell,
    Henry Bergman, Kitty Bradbury, Albert Austin
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp gets on a boat bound for America in one of his classic two-reel comedies. It's really just two episodes - one on the boat at sea and the other in a restaurant after the ship's arrival - and you can see the potential for a much longer movie. (If he'd made it a few years later, it almost certainly would've been a feature.) Eric Campbell (of course) plays the restaurant waiter. Edna Purviance (of course) plays the girl.

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Aki Kaurismaki
    Sherwan Haji, Sakari Kuosmanen, Kati Outinen,
    Tommi Korpela, Nirz Haji, Simon Al-Bazoon
A Syrian refugee named Khaled stows away on a cargo ship and ends up in Helsinki, where he tries to adjust to life as a stranger in a strange land. It's Kaurismaki reworking the story he told in "Le Havre" (2011), and it's another tale about common humanity overcoming (at least some of the time) long and often inhuman odds. The humor's more deadpan than ever, and a lot of what happens isn't funny at all. Khaled won't give up, though, no matter how the fates (and racist thugs and indifferent bureaucrats) are knocking him around. Nothing that happens in Helsinki can possibly be worse than the horror he's left behind, and he knows it, and so he trudges on. Maybe that's the other side of hope.